[mingus88]

That was such a mind blowing experience coming from a DOS background. It would split your terminal horizontally and you could see each other type in real time.

Before the days of SMS, and even before the days of instant messengers like ICQ and AIM, I taught the split-screen `talk` command to my girlfriend so we could chat while I was working. We've been married for 20 years now.

[ww520]

The one program truly blew my mind at the time was Netrek - the first networked multi-player realtime graphical space fighting game. I've wasted so much time late into the nights playing the game in the lab instead of doing coursework.

The admin came to the lab from time to time and said we're hogging the workstations with the game and banned the game during daytime.

[BrandoElFollito]

I remember ca. 2000 my best friend busting into my office, pushing me aside, logging in savagely to something and having a sight of relief.

He managed to send back a fleet or something - it was a real time game where you needed to do stuff at the right time (after sometimes a few hours). I do not remember the name of the game but it was fashionable for some time (not sure if it was text based or not)

[sdwr]

Those games are still kicking around. Played Neptune's Pride a while back, would not recommend, seems designed to devour your waking (and what should be sleeping) life.

[gwerbret]

> The one program truly blew my mind at the time was Netrek - the first networked multi-player realtime graphical space fighting game.

Anything like mtrek? It's still around [0], and even over telnet [1].

0: https://mtrek.com 1: telnet://mtrek.com:1701

[ww520]

It's a fast paced multi-player space battle game with a top down graphic 2D view. It's like Command and Conquer, with each unit controlled by a different player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQkDhwo7qNQ

[NoZebra120vClip]

"talk" was often bugged (and IIRC, used UDP) so it was soon updated by xtalk and then ytalk. ytalk was like the kitchen sink of talk, with a huge feature set and compatibility with everything that went before. Everyone had to get ytalk for sure.

[skykooler]

I use ytalk on a VPS that me and a friend have ssh logins for. It's still a neat way of communicating that I don't think any modern chat apps do.

[knorker]

I once talked to a somewhat famous hacker by logging in to an account he set up via SSH that spawned 'talk' as the shell.

He didn't trust IRC and other chat systems.

Is the end he got caught anyway due to sloppy opsec. Like many other hackers.

[taneq]

Oh man, that brings it back! ytalk on the university student server was just about the first instant messaging system I used. My typing speed went way up after a few weeks.

[DonHopkins]

Long before Unix talk, ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System at the MIT AI Lab) had a program called UNTALK, written by a user named UNCOLA, that supported split screen text chat, back around 1992 or earlier.

Incompatible Timesharing System:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste...

Getting Started Computing at the Al Lab by Christopher C. Stacy. MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY WORKING PAPER 235 7 September 1982:

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41180/AI_WP_2...

>6.10.3. TALK

>If you want to link to someone who is on another ITS machine, you can use the TALK program. The program is run by typing:

>*:talk uname@host

>To exit TALK terminating the conversation, the user who initiated TALK must type ^C.

>This method of comlinking is less versatile than the backnext commands, and only works across ITS machines (not locally).

>Another useful comlink program is UNTALK. UNTALK is similar to TALK but does not work across machines. However, on a display terminal, UNTALK splits the screen horizontally and allows the two people to type at the same time on their part of the screen.

The "backnext commands" he referred to would actually let you not only perform a text chat link (albeit not split screen), but also take over another user's TTY, to type into and see the output of their DDT shell and programs. There was no security other than obscurity on ITS, and that feature of linking to and sharing another user's TTY was meant for collaboration, helping, and teaching people, and also initializing and configuring output-only serial devices like line printers.

History of the Net is Important, by Keith F. Lynch:

http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACN8-1.pdf

>[...] ITS stood for the Incompatible Time-sharing System, an obvious take-off on CTSS, the Compatible Time-Sharing System. (Just as Unix is a take-off on the earlier TENEX, TWENEX, and MULTICS.)

>All four ITS machines also had UNTALK, a split-screen conferencing program similar to the later “talk” on Unix and PHONE on VMS. I was told it was written by a user whose ITS username was UNCOLA and who had committed suicide. I don’t know if it was the first program of that type, but it was the first I had seen.

Even before that, ARPANET TIPs supported a low level way of text chatting (not split screen) called a "TIP to TIP Link" (documented on page 5-4 of the "Users Guide to the Terminal IMP") where each participant bounced their packets off of a port on some host, without actually logging in or going through the host.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518273

Users Guide to the Terminal IMP (1975):

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_bbntipADA0eTerminalIMP...

[amichal]

I did a summer program at MIT around then and remember a program that let you send popup messages in xwindows to other users or to a channel. You could subscribe to any channel and use wild cards. I remember being hacked by someone to subscribe "*" and being unable to use my terminal for a while until i figured out how to unsubscribe without being able to see what i was typing under the wall of messages. I thought it was called zyphermail but the interent seems to have no memory of this.

[DonHopkins]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951917

Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.

So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.

It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...

...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:

http://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35759965

[craig_s_bell]

You might be thinking of Zephyr, which was part of Project Athena. My school was using Athena, and I occasionally received zephyrgrams from people at MIT.

http://web.mit.edu/sipb/doc/working/izephyr/html/izephyr.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)

[amichal]

That was it! Thank you for the references

[dsr_]

The Zulip chat system is explicitly based on the same ideas, if not the same code.