IRCd - History

History

The original IRCd was known as 'ircd', and was authored by Jarkko Oikarinen (WiZ on IRC) in 1988. He received help from a number of others, such as Markku Savela (msa on IRC), who helped with the 2.2+msa release, etc.

In its first incarnations, IRC did not have many features that are taken for granted today, such as named channels and channel operators. Channels were numbered – channel 4 and channel 57, for example – and the channel topic described the kind of conversation that took place in the channel. One holdover of this is that joining channel 0 causes a client to leave all the channels it is presently on: "CHANNEL 0" being the original command to leave the current channel.

The first major change to IRC, in version 2.5, was to add named channels – "+channels". "+channels" were later replaced with "#channels" in version 2.7, numeric channels were removed entirely and channel bans (mode +b) were implemented.

Around version 2.7, there was a small but notable dispute, which led to ircu – the Undernet fork of ircd.

irc2.8 added "&channels" (those that exist only on the current server, rather than the entire network) and "!channels" (those that are theoretically safe from suffering from the many ways that a user could exploit a channel by "riding a netsplit"), and is the baseline release from which nearly all current implementations are derived.

Around 2.8 came the concept of nick and channel delay, a system designed to help curb abusive practices such as takeovers and split riding. This was not agreed on by the majority of modern IRC (EFnet, DALnet, Undernet, etc.) - and thus, 2.8 was forked into a number of different daemons using an opposing theory known as TS – or time stamping, which stored a unique time stamp with each channel or nickname on the network to decide which was the 'correct' one to keep. More information on this may be found at http://www.ircd-hybrid.com/history.html.

Time stamping itself has been revised several times to fix various issues in its design. The latest versions of such protocols are:

• the TS6 protocol, which is used by EFnet, and Hybrid and Ratbox based servers amongst others
• the P10 protocol, which is used by Undernet and ircu based servers.

While the client-to-server protocols are at least functionally similar, server-to-server protocols differ widely (TS5, P10, and ND/CD server protocols are incompatible), making it very difficult to "link" two separate implementations of the IRC server. Some "bridge" servers do exist, to allow linking of, for example, 2.10 servers to TS5 servers, but these are often accompanied with restrictions of which parts of each protocol may be used, and are not widely deployed.

Significant releases based on 2.8 included:

• 2.8.21+CS, developed by Chris Behrens (Comstud)
• 2.8+th, Taner Halicioglu's patchset, which later became
  • Hybrid IRCd, originally developed by Jon Lusky (Rodder) and Diane Bruce (Dianora) as 2.8/hybrid, later joined by a large development team.
• 2.9, 2.10, 2.11, ... continue the development of the original codebase,

The original code base continued to be developed mainly for use on the IRCnet network. New server-to-server protocols were introduced in version 2.10, released in 1998, and in 2.11, first released in 2004, and current as of 2007. This daemon is used by IRCnet and it can be found at http://www.irc.org/ftp/irc/server/ The original ircd is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License. This development line produced the 4 IRC RFCs released after RFC 1459, which document this server protocol exclusively.

2.8.21+CS and Hybrid IRCd continue to be used on EFnet, with ircd-ratbox (an offshoot of ircd-hybrid) as of 2004 being the most popular.