IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a virtual meeting place where people from all over the world can meet and talk; you'll find the whole diversity of human interests, ideas, and issues here, and you'll be able to participate in group discussions on one of the many thousands of IRC channels, on hundreds of IRC networks, or just talk in private to family or friends, wherever they are in the world.
To use IRC you need a small application like mIRC, an IRC client for Windows that was written by Khaled Mardam-Bey. mIRC is a friendly IRC client that is well equipped with options and tools.
There is no restriction to the number of people that can participate in a given discussion, or the number of channels that can be formed on IRC. As a user you run a "client" program like mIRC which connects to a "server" in an IRC network. All servers are interconnected and pass messages from user to user over the IRC network. One server can be connected to several other servers and up to hundreds of clients.

· UTF-8 support with font linking.
· A powerful dynamic /help command.
· Netscape, Mosaic and MS Internet Explorer support .... surf the www waves !!
· An 'off you go' Toolbar.... and even Tooltips !
· A very handy Switchbar.
· A user programmable menu bar.
· A simple and smart CTCP commands and Events handler.
· Support for wav and midi sound files.
· Colored text to ease reading.
· Simple, fully configurable aliases.
· Configurable popup menus.
· Full DCC Send/Get/Chat support including passive DCC.
· Full configurable fonts and colors and support of bold, underline and reverse text.
· Built in Ident and Finger server.
· A simple but powerful and safe built-in File server.
· Programmable Function keys.

Requirements:
· Internet account and a properly installed Winsock

Limitations:
· 30-day trial
· Nag screen

What's New in This Release:
· The project to convert mIRC to Unicode has taken almost two years of development and testing and has required tens of thousands of changes to 150,000+ lines of source code. This has been the most complex and time-consuming update to mIRC since it was created in 1995, when it started out as a non-Unicode, 16-bit, Windows 3.1 application.
· Many areas of mIRC have had to be updated or re-written, from file handling to text processing, from display to memory allocation, from server communications to file transfers.
· mIRC should now be faster, more stable, and more compatible with the latest versions of Windows, and should be able to better handle the display and input of a variety of languages.
In addition to being converted to Unicode, there are a few other notable changes:
· Improved Windows 7 compatibility
· More reliable INI file handling
· Faster text display/scrolling
· Speech support
· Improved interface design for a number of features
· Automatic text color correction
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