Jarkko Oikarinen
More info
- Known for
- Creating IRC
- Released
- 1988
- Nationality
- Finnish
The Finnish student who wrote IRC over a summer in Oulu in 1988.
In August 1988 Oikarinen was working on OuluBox, the University of Oulu's BBS, and wanted to replace its chat program with something that could span several machines. The result was Internet Relay Chat, with the first server running on a host called tolsun.oulu.fi. Within months it had spread to other Finnish universities and then across the Atlantic.
IRC's breakthrough as a news channel came in 1991, when users reported live from the Gulf War and the coup attempt in Moscow. With Darren Reed, Oikarinen wrote RFC 1459 (1993), documenting the protocol after the fact. He went on to an ordinary career in software engineering — modest company for someone whose summer project is still running open source communities worldwide.