PIRCH or pIRCh is a shareware

Shareware

The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...

 IRC

Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...

 client published by Northwest Computer Services. Its name is an acronym — PolarGeek's IRC Hack.

The last version of the program, known as PIRCH98, was released in 1998. PIRCH has in the past been considered to be the number two Windows IRC client behind mIRC

MIRC

mIRC is an Internet Relay Chat client for Microsoft Windows, created in 1995 and developed by Khaled Mardam-Bey. Although it is a fully functional chat utility, its integrated scripting language makes it extensible and versatile....

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PIRCH inspired the creation of Vortec IRC due to a lack of software updates.

Reception

In 1999, Joe Barr of LinuxWorld referred to Pirch as "nice Windows client." Forrest Stroud's 1998 review of Pirch stated it has "great selection of features and is an IRC client that will especially appeal to novice IRC users", such as the capability of simultaneous multiple server connections. But Stroud noted, "PIRCH is relatively slow in listing channels for servers and also lacks the capability to filter the number of channels based on the number of users or the ability to sort based on the name of a channel."

External links

• Pirchat.com. Official site. (archive)
• PIRCH FAQ
• PIRCH98 (archive)