O'Reilly Releases "IRC Hacks:"

IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, may well turn out to be the world's most successful hack. As Paul Mutton, author of "IRC Hacks" (O'Reilly, US $24.95) explains, IRC started as a summer trainee's programming exercise. In 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen, a student at the University of Oulu, Finland, wrote the first IRC program. Subsequently, Mutton notes, "A hack grew into a software development project that hundreds of people participated in, and then became a worldwide environment where tens of thousands of people now spend time with each other."