[phuff]

`phone` and `talk` were two of my favorite things to do on the internet way back in the day. Almost better than IRC was starting up a chat with somebody on the local University VAX or Unix boxes that you had never met before.

This and the .plan/finger posts from a few days ago are playing to the nostalgia of a better time on the internet. :). Iirc you could also do fully animated .plan files on VAXes at the time.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Talk was really easy to use and worked well as I recall. Split screen, real-time communication. It was better than anything available on a PC OS. I remember trying it with someone who knew nothing more about computers than any other student.

[toast0]

Depending on your time perioid, PowWow [1] offered a multi-party talk experience on Windows. It also had a shared painting area and a shared browser experience (IIRC, it just launched the same URL in each participant's browser, which at the time was sufficient; there may have been something that detected new URLs loaded by the host to pass along)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)