Every intelligent person
uses chatting for communicating with friends, colleagues, relatives and even
unknown people. These days it’s hard to imagine a life without computer chatting
and other applications that let us communicate cheaply and over great distances.
But does anyone know, how this all began?
I think it’ll
be interesting for You, my dear reader, to know: Chat rooms became popular with
the dawn of the Internet, but actually were around about 20 years before the
World Wide Web even came into existence.
So, the timeline
of different ways people’s communicating using computers, from the early days
in the ´60s until the start of the Web in the early ´90s.
We are speaking about on-line chatting. So, the first text-based chat room was Talkomatic.
Talkomatic was developed in 1973 by Doug Brown. It was like a chat room
with windows displayed for each logged-in user. And all, that user typed,
was instantly transmitted, so all users could see each other type.
Talkers were chat systems, that allowed people to talk to each other
over the Internet. In many ways they were the predecessors of today’s messaging applications.
Quantum Link was an online service featured electronic mail, chat rooms, instant
messaging and much more. An interesting fact is that Quantum Link was later renamed and became America Online.
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a real-time Internet chat and
conferencing system. Users connect to channels to discuss different
topics and it’s also possible to communicate one-on-one.As I've foung, it is still today a very popular way of communication over the Internet.
Prodigy launched in 1988, was an online service similar to
CompuServe. By 1990 it was the second-largest online service provider
after CompuServe. Unlike CompuServe, Prodigy had a graphical user
interface instead of a command line interface which made it easier to
use. The service also pioneered the concept of online communities.
AOL, or America Online (as I've previously mentioned) grew out of
Quantum Link. After it the company had launched services for the Mac and the PC called
AppleLink and PC Link. The company changed its name to America Online in 1989. AOL grew to become the largest service provider during the ‘90s.
Good start on the subject of online chatting. Remember you don't have to tell about all the different names of chat services all in one post, you could tell about them in a later post also. Save something for the later weeks.
ReplyDeleteThanks. DH