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 active window now correctly receives the focus when maximized windows are switched or closed.
· Hash table commands hadd/hinc/hdec when used with the -cuNz switches no longer cause data corruption in hash tables.
· Custom DLLs that perform window/message hooking no longer cause mIRC to crash on exit.
· The Alt+Minus key combination has been changed to allow the use of Alt+NumberPadMinus for zooming in screen readers.
· The socket identifier $sock() now returns the correct saddr/sport values for UDP connections.
· The Server and DCC connection issue that resulted in the "Address already in use" message should now be resolved.
· Other changes and bug fixes.