Computer Chat

I've been chatting online for quite some time. The first time [cue dramatic music] was as a freshman with a friend named Mary, who had accompanied me to the computer lab - I had to pick up a printout. The computer lab was a bunch of terminals providing access to a VAX/VMS network. On VMS, the PHONE command popped up a request on another person's terminal, which they could respond to with the ANSWER command. At that time, the screen split in half and away you both typed. Mary and I probably did this once or twice a week for a semester or two - it was cheap fun for two people stuck on campus.

Later on in grad school I tried out the UNIX talk command, but never really spent much time doing this. By then, the rage was internet relay chat (IRC). Through IRC you could fire up your client, log into a server, and have hundreds of "channels" (i.e. conversations) to join. It was hectic, as with dozens of people on a channel the text flew by pretty quickly. Back then the channels were mostly computer related subjects, from linux support to people interested in trading files of various types. ;) I poked around a bit, sent and received a few files via the DCC subcommand, and lost interest, because I found something else...

That something else I found was internet bulletin boards. By using telnet, you could log onto a board and find a way to kill a few hours. They were more organized the IRC - you had a user account on the board, there were various topics to post under (e.g. movies, top ten lists, sports), and they also had chat rooms. The chat rooms implemented a subset of IRC functionality, allowing users to chat but not send files, for example. That was fine, as nearly everybody just wanted to post and chat. The BBS I spent most my time hanging out on was seabass, run at the University of Southern Mississippi. Chatting and posting there, I made a few friends, and we phoned each other to say hi, sent each other graduation invitations, etc. My nickname on seabass was docm, for Dr. Manhattan, who is a character from The Watchmen, a pretty cool comic book series I had recently read. I remember once working on a homework assignment with a friend Vicki (a.k.a. enchantrss - seabass had a 10 character limitation on a nickname) even though we were at different Universities - out assignments were similar and we worked together in the seabass chat room!

I just checked for the existence of seabass (seabass.st.usm.edu), and it looks like it is no longer there. Google pulls up some references to it, but they look like entries in configuration files. Oh well, it has been 7+ years since I logged on. I wouldn't remember my password anyway.

Months passed and I didn't do any online chat, as I was busy and people I knew drifted away. That's because 95% of them were students, and we slowly graduated, got jobs, moved away, and didn't have the time anymore.

Then, in early 1997, I received email from a friend Rekha, who was excited about a new program she stumbled across named ICQ. I had never heard of it, but she convinced me to split the registration fee with her (register one copy and get a free one for a friend) and we tried it out. This was the first graphical chat client I tried and it was really nice - easy to use, easy to look people up. ICQ had generic chat rooms for various hobbies and I spent a bit of time there. I got busy, moved to Washington for a job, and kinda dropped off the ICQ map. My user account is still listed but don't bother using it as I've forgotten the password, and either email address I would have used to register back then are long defunct.

ICQ marked the rise of IM (instant messaging). AOL bought ICQ and put out AIM, Yahoo! and Microsoft decided they needed their own IM clients. No more logging into another server directly, now your online status is communicated on your behalf so you just run the client and a list of your friends appears. Talking to them is as easy as a double click.

Now I use IM as part of my job! I'm at a remote site and we use both Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Mesenger to talk to our co-workers at the main site - this is perfect for quick questions and short announcements, and of course deciding on where to go for lunch. So I'm basically logged into both of those networks all day during work. Up until recently, I would hibernate my work notebook before leaving for the day, and that would log me out of IM networks. I still do that but occasionally I log into IM at home, and chat with a few friends I've made (hi Gail!).

Now I'm even planning to try out IRC again, after being away for a decade or so. I have a few (female!) friends who IRC and they are claiming it is fun. It isn't that I don't believe them, I guess I just have this lingering memory from ten years ago, where the demographic of IRC users was a bit different than today. And, this is something I'm curious enough to "see". That's the shocking part, never in my lifetime did I think IRC would appeal to anybody other than male computer science students.

But, I never though an internet BBS would appeal either. In some ways Orkut and Seabass are similar - they both had discussion groups and user accounts. Orkut has way more eye-candy - picture albums and avatars, while Seabass had chat. Orkut also has about 1000 times as many users, lets you network friends, has a far more representative cross section of users, and the benefit of coming along years later. We can all thank web browsers for this, making things easier and graphical!

I've downloaded two IRC clients and will try them out soon...