Early Internet talkers In the school year of 1983–1984, Mark Jenks and Todd Krause, two students at Washington High School in
Milwaukee, wrote a software program for talking among a group of people. They used the
PDP-11 at the
Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) central office. After searching around the PDP-11 files and directories, Mark found the PDP-11 program
talk, and decided that they could do better. The system had approximately 40 300–2400
bit per second modems attached to it, with a single phone number and a
hunt group. The talk program was named TALK and was written to handle many options that are seen in
IRC today: tables, private messages, actions, moderators and inviting to tables. Another talk server called NUTS, which stood for Neil's Unix Talk Server, was released in 1993 and became fairly popular on Unix systems. Its command system was broadly based on the Unaxcess BBS and being room based it took a lot of inspiration from MUDs too. The source code was given away and became the basis of a huge number of variants and rewrites during the 1990s.
Cat Chat was the first Internet /
JANET talker, created in 1990.
Talker hosting In 1996, talker.com was formed, the first server to sell space for talkers, later giving it the name Dragonroost. The server had over 90 talkers on it at one time, during the mid-1990s boom of talkers. A number of other hosts started up as alternative hosting companies to talker.com. Talker.com ceased hosting any other talkers besides its owners' on September 28, 2009. ==See also==