The other great thing about talk/ytalk (which, I think, originated on PLATO with TERM-talk and talkomatic) was that you got to see every character echoed as it was typed, so you could impart/discern meaning by, e.g. typing slower or faster, or making intentional mistakes for humor’s sake, or backspacing/typing/backspacing/typing to show indecisiveness, and on and on. A rich communicative tapestry.
I have to wonder how much security vetting any of these talk software suites have had recently.
I do think fondly back on the early years when you’d get a talk request from somebody and end up meeting an undergrad from Australia or Europe or something.
Back when the internet was magic and not plumbing :)
Weirdly enough, only a few weeks ago I used talk for the first time in maybe 15 years. It took me a while to work out that I needed to enable it in inetd first (heck, what services even use inetd any more - I had to enable it on my OpenBSD system first). Brought back some great memories of my first forays into using Unix systems back in the 90s…
The other great thing about talk/ytalk (which, I think, originated on PLATO with TERM-talk and talkomatic) was that you got to see every character echoed as it was typed, so you could impart/discern meaning by, e.g. typing slower or faster, or making intentional mistakes for humor’s sake, or backspacing/typing/backspacing/typing to show indecisiveness, and on and on. A rich communicative tapestry.
I have to wonder how much security vetting any of these talk software suites have had recently.
I do think fondly back on the early years when you’d get a talk request from somebody and end up meeting an undergrad from Australia or Europe or something.
Back when the internet was magic and not plumbing :)
Weirdly enough, only a few weeks ago I used talk for the first time in maybe 15 years. It took me a while to work out that I needed to enable it in inetd first (heck, what services even use inetd any more - I had to enable it on my OpenBSD system first). Brought back some great memories of my first forays into using Unix systems back in the 90s…