Chat

The Histories of Chat

Because of simultaneous developments in mainframe-based time-sharing systems and in microcomputer-based bulletin-board services, chat has never followed a singular line of evolution. Thus, the answer to “how electronic chatting began” often changes depending on who is asked, and when. “Even in the days of cards, punches, and dumb printing consoles, chatting was possible,” notes programmer Jeff Kell, who remembers rudimentary chats occurring over shared IBM 360s, which were invented in 1964.

For many of the earliest computer users, the story of chatting on shared mainframe computers begins with Talk, Write, and Finger—programs utilized by the UNIX operating system, which was introduced in the 1970s. Talk allowed users running UNIX to speak to one another a sentence at a time, using a split screen. Write, a primitive version of what is now known as instant messaging, allowed users to communicate by copying lines from their terminals to others. Finally, Finger helped UNIX users determine who else was currently online and available for chatting.

As popular as it was, not everyone came to computerized chat through UNIX. In France, for instance, a proprietary system called the Minitel messageries permitted teletext chat among users. When offices around America began networking their microcomputers, vendors like Novell began marketing programs similar to, though not identical to, Talk, Write, and Finger. Finally, on microcomputer bulletin board systems (BBSs), chat flourished via specially written programs with names like CompuServe's CB Simulator. Even today, services like America Online still use proprietary software to run their chat rooms.

During the 1970s and 1980s, chats were somewhat local affairs, restricted to users of a specific mainframe, networked together in an office or dialed into a single BBS. There were exceptions, however. National Fido Hour was a one-hour-per-day time slot in which users of the FidoNet BBSs were connected to one another in order to chat without long-distance charges. And Relay was a highly popular service on the BITNET network, which connected a number of university computers that were not on the ARPANET.

The arrival of wide-scale long-distance online chatting began with a program called—aptly enough—Chat. This program, written by Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988, permitted multiple users on multiple computers to speak to one another using their Internet connections. Though Oikarinen's program wasn't necessarily the first of its kind, it has had the longest lineage, spawning the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks. To this day, many Web-based chat rooms use some version of Oikarinen's original program, albeit aided by Java-based interfaces to make the experience easier to navigate for the user.

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