| 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... |