[dtjohnnymonkey]

One of my first moments on the internet was chatting on Compuserve using the DOS client. Chats were sent character-by-character so everyone’s text was constantly stomping over everyone else’s. But it was amazing that those were people from all over the country you could chat with.

[NoZebra120vClip]

When I was first introduced to Unix (SVR3) all the students used 'write' to chit-chat, and somehow we adopted conventions so that our text would not stomp (it was line-by-line, though) so we would write something like "-o" for "over" when we were finished typing, and "-oo" or "o&o" when we wanted to end the convo.

When MUDs became a thing, it was soon a stigma to be "on raw telnet" as we'd say, because a client could easily handle incoming text while you're typing a line at the same time. And so I became utterly addicted to full-duplex conversations, hardly even caring if I stayed on topic.