these days there is a dizzying number of
chat and communication apps for your smartphone or tablet I mean it only
takes a couple of seconds to open up the app store or the Play store and find
literally dozens of offerings that all promise to be the best most fun and most
intuitive way to do essentially the same thing send messages photos or short
videos to your friends or enemies as it were but all of
the modern programs we use to stay in touch that are more or less carbon
copies of each other are the product of Decades of evolution from predecessors
that were dramatically different so
while email is often considered to predate Modern instant messaging by a
fair margin they actually didn't first appear all that far apart from each
other the modern form of email that uses the familiar at sign was invented back
in 1971 on the old arpanet a US military
Network that was one of the forerunners of the internet and realtime online chat
became a reality just 2 years later in
1973 when the archetypically Retros sounding Taco mtic was created at the
University of Illinois although ttic only featured six
rooms of up to five users each the
functionality was similar to modern chat rooms including the IRC system with its
large number of channels that appeared a decade and a half later in
1988 and there have been other improvements like typewriters T comatic
punished users for typos because it transmitted individual keystrokes as
they were input meaning that all your Elite hacker buddies would know
instantly if you didn't know how to correctly spell diarrhea fun fact too
ttic is actually still available as a modern website if you'd like to check
out a piece of internet history but online chat quickly outgrew small groups
communicating directly and many were more interested in seeing what larger
groups of people were discussing more generally that's where using a phone
modem to connect to a bulletin board system or BBS comes in it's pretty much
what it sounds like after logging in you could see what other folks posted to a
virtual bulletin board and make your own contributions if you wanted to weigh in
much like modern web message boards or forums the first BBS was launched in
Chicago all the way back in 1978
providing a place for open online discussion well before the rise of the
worldwide web and they proved to be very versatile in fact people began using
bbs's for file sharing as well meaning
they became very popular in the early
1990s however during the web's explosive growth soon after the BBS scene was
nearly forgotten by the late 9s though it continues to be popular in Taiwan for
some reason and speaking of continuing to be popular the venerable uset
developed at Duke University all the way back in 1980 still has a considerable if
not large following to this day uset is
organized into topical sections called news groups that allow users to post
both articles and replies kind of similar to how Reddit works today except
instead of being hosted on one server uset is much more distributed with
articles and replies pushed out to many different news servers and special uset
clients required for access this is because uset isn't part of the web like
bbs's uset later came to be used for
file transfers which is the most popular reason people access the network today
as actual discussion is much more common on we Based Services though many isps no
longer offer access to uset due to concerns about illegal file sharing of
course things really changed in the mid90s with the rise of instant
messaging programs for modern graphical operating systems like icq and more
notably AOL Instant Messenger or aim
which took the World by storm with its buddy icons and angsty user BIOS replete
with inside jokes thanks in no small part to to all of those promotional
discs that AOL sent out via snail mail aim had plenty of Rivals on the instant
messaging scene but remained very popular until the late 2000s when Gmail
became widespread and offered integrated g chat helping to set a trend that saw a
myriad of websites and smartphone apps Implement instant messaging with
everything from business oriented video conferencing software to dating websites
like Okay Cupid getting into the wing of things and with standard internet speeds
becoming faster and faster from both cell phone providers and traditional
isps it didn't take long for picture and
video messaging to become common in IM applications with some programs like
Apple's FaceTime for video and Snapchat initially pictures but now video as well
focusing almost exclusively on it no
word yet though on when we'll have support for holographic messaging so you
can give your friends a 360 review of whatever trendy food you just spent way
too much money on for the sole purpose of sending a picture of it to them
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