Education
While working at the University of Oulu in August 1988, he wrote the first IRC server and client programs, which he produced to replace the MUT (MultiUser Talk) program on the Finnish Bulletin Board System OuluBox.
While working at the University of Oulu in August 1988, he wrote the first IRC server and client programs, which he produced to replace the MUT (MultiUser Talk) program on the Finnish Bulletin Board System OuluBox.
Using the Bitnet Relay chat system as inspiration, Oikarinen continued to develop IRC over the next four years, receiving assistance from Darren Reed in co-authoring the IRC Protocol. Having received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oulu in 1999, in areas of computer graphics and medical imaging, his efforts in the latter field focused on telemedicine, volume rendering, signal processing and computed axial tomography. He is also partner and chief software architect at an electronic games developer called Numeric Garden (Espoo, Finland).
His earlier positions include Chief Software Architect of Add2Phone Oy (Helsinki, Finland), Head of R&Doctorate in Capricode (Oulu, Finland) and General Manager in Nokia.
Oikarinen is currently working for Google on the Google Hangouts project in Sweden.