While Jarkko Oikarinen is the genius credited with inventing the Internet Relay Chat, Khaled Mardam-Bey is the genius who wrote mIRC.

mIRC is a shareware client which connects to IRC servers. I've been using mIRC since sometime in 1995. I've seen it grow and change and improve. It's become very user-friendly, but it still has a lot of space for those of us who know what we're doing. There's also a very powerful programming language that allows people to modify their copies of mIRC to their own liking. If you modify your copy so it looks or does things differently, and then put the modifications somewhere so that people can download it, you're said to have made a "script". There are very basic scripts and very extensive scripts, but for this article, we're going to concentrate on a bare-bones copy of mIRC 5.91.