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ircII is a Unix IRC client that is made available completely free of charge, and is available in source form.
Designed to run in a text-mode environment, ircII is not pretty -- it has no sounds, graphics, menus, pop-ups, etc. It is, however, fast, stable, lightweight, portable, and easily backgrounded using virtual terminals such as Unix " screen".
As the Unix and Unix-like systems evolved and increased in popularity, more, newer IRC clients have been developed for them as well. Perhaps the most common are BitchX and EPIC, both variants of the ircII client with greater functionality built into them at some stage in their development.
At one time, the ircII client set the standard against which all other clients were developed and measured. While this may still hold true to some extent today, the Windows client mIRC has largely taken over that position.