About Ircd and how it came to exist
IRCD stands for "Internet Relay Chat Daemon". It was originally written by Jarkko Oikarinen ([email protected]) in 1988. Since starting in Finland, it has been used in over 60 countries around the world. It was designed as a replacement for the "talk" program but has become much much more than that. IRC is a multi-user chat system, where people convene on "channels" (a virtual place, usually with a topic of conversation) to talk in groups, or privately. The 'D' (daemon) part of the IRC simply means the actual server(source-code) that's ran for people to connect.
IRC gained international fame during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, where updates from around the world came accross the wire, and most irc users who were online at the time gathered on a single channel to hear these reports. IRC had similar uses during the coup against Boris Yeltsin in September 1993, where IRC users from Moscow were giving live reports about the unstable situation there.
Around then, many college students from schools all over the world started hosting these ircd servers on local unix machines which were connected to what was then known as the IntraNet. Soon after, the IntraNet developed into what today we know as the InterNet which allowed more people to experience the wonderful communication threw a web of servers known as the Ircd.