IRC is a medium that has been around for literally decades—and was one of first ways Russian citizens could communicate with the outside world during the fall of the USSR. It's low bandwidth (especially if they used it in the early 1990's), easy to use, free, no advertising or spam, and is completely different than the infamous AOL chatrooms of lure. There are a bunch of IRC networks out there (each of which has a whole bunch of servers), and we use the EFNet network out there—one of the oldest and largest around. The first thing you have to do is get an IRC client. The great news is that they're easily found and work on just about every computer and operating system known to man. The easiest client that we've dealt with is called “xchat,” and it works with Windows, *nix, and OS X. The following instructions are assuming you're using xchat, but they will apply to any decent client that you might want to use. See the bottom of this post for download links. But before you get started configuring your client and all of that exciting stuff, we first need to introduce you to the channels!

Setting up your client

The great news is that connecting to IRC is astoundingly easy. When you set up xchat (assuming you're using this great client), a window will pop up when you first run it asking about your nickname and other information—fill in what you want, keeping in mind that Efnet's nick limit is 9 characters. Then select “EFnet” in the list of servers and click connect. After you've connected, there should be an input line at the bottom. Type in “/join #tcpa” and “/join #calcgames” without the quotes. It's really that easy. Even if you somehow manage to close the box that greets you when you open xchat, you can still connect to a server using that little input line, just be sure to type in “/server irc.efnet.net” and waiting until you connect before you join the channels. If you have any questions, difficulties, or other concerns, don't hesitate to reply to use google