With the advancement of technology, users have been presented with different kinds of online chat programs. They help communicate with any person sitting in any part of world, breaking barriers of time and space.
Such a possibility would not have become real if not for the Finnish computer scientist Jarkko Oikarinen. He was the inventor of the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the first internet chat program in the world.
It was in 1988 that Oikarinen developed the Internet Relay Chat, while working at the University of Oulu. He earned the nickname ‘WiZ’ with this invention.
Developed over four years, IRC is an application facilitating communication in the form of text. It is currently the most widely used chat systems. Although designed for group communication, IRC also allows one to one chats as well as data transfer.
Oikarinen has held top posts in many firms, including Nokia, where he served as the general manager. Presently, he works for the Google Hangouts project in Sweden.