With IRC you had to download a Client, a program that allowed you to connect to different servers. The most popular being mIRC (side-note IRC and the mIRC client are also still around). With IRC you connected to different servers (most popular were Efnet and Undernet).

On the servers you could create channels devoted to different subjects or just regions. For example I first joined #GayVa on Undernet (there weren't many people from NC at the time on that server) and #GayNC on Efnet.

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