The History of Online Communication
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
1,083 words · ~5 min read
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these days there is a dizzying number of
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chat and communication apps for your smartphone or tablet I mean it only
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takes a couple of seconds to open up the app store or the Play store and find
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literally dozens of offerings that all promise to be the best most fun and most
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intuitive way to do essentially the same thing send messages photos or short
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videos to your friends or enemies as it were but all of
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the modern programs we use to stay in touch that are more or less carbon
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copies of each other are the product of Decades of evolution from predecessors
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that were dramatically different so
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while email is often considered to predate Modern instant messaging by a
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fair margin they actually didn't first appear all that far apart from each
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other the modern form of email that uses the familiar at sign was invented back
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in 1971 on the old arpanet a US military
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Network that was one of the forerunners of the internet and realtime online chat
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became a reality just 2 years later in
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1973 when the archetypically Retros sounding Taco mtic was created at the
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University of Illinois although ttic only featured six
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rooms of up to five users each the
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functionality was similar to modern chat rooms including the IRC system with its
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large number of channels that appeared a decade and a half later in
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1988 and there have been other improvements like typewriters T comatic
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punished users for typos because it transmitted individual keystrokes as
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they were input meaning that all your Elite hacker buddies would know
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instantly if you didn't know how to correctly spell diarrhea fun fact too
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ttic is actually still available as a modern website if you'd like to check
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out a piece of internet history but online chat quickly outgrew small groups
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communicating directly and many were more interested in seeing what larger
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groups of people were discussing more generally that's where using a phone
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modem to connect to a bulletin board system or BBS comes in it's pretty much
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what it sounds like after logging in you could see what other folks posted to a
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virtual bulletin board and make your own contributions if you wanted to weigh in
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much like modern web message boards or forums the first BBS was launched in
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Chicago all the way back in 1978
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providing a place for open online discussion well before the rise of the
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worldwide web and they proved to be very versatile in fact people began using
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bbs's for file sharing as well meaning
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they became very popular in the early
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1990s however during the web's explosive growth soon after the BBS scene was
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nearly forgotten by the late 9s though it continues to be popular in Taiwan for
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some reason and speaking of continuing to be popular the venerable uset
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developed at Duke University all the way back in 1980 still has a considerable if
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not large following to this day uset is
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organized into topical sections called news groups that allow users to post
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both articles and replies kind of similar to how Reddit works today except
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instead of being hosted on one server uset is much more distributed with
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articles and replies pushed out to many different news servers and special uset
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clients required for access this is because uset isn't part of the web like
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bbs's uset later came to be used for
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file transfers which is the most popular reason people access the network today
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as actual discussion is much more common on we Based Services though many isps no
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longer offer access to uset due to concerns about illegal file sharing of
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course things really changed in the mid90s with the rise of instant
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messaging programs for modern graphical operating systems like icq and more
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notably AOL Instant Messenger or aim
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which took the World by storm with its buddy icons and angsty user BIOS replete
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with inside jokes thanks in no small part to to all of those promotional
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discs that AOL sent out via snail mail aim had plenty of Rivals on the instant
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messaging scene but remained very popular until the late 2000s when Gmail
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became widespread and offered integrated g chat helping to set a trend that saw a
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myriad of websites and smartphone apps Implement instant messaging with
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everything from business oriented video conferencing software to dating websites
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like Okay Cupid getting into the wing of things and with standard internet speeds
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becoming faster and faster from both cell phone providers and traditional
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isps it didn't take long for picture and
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video messaging to become common in IM applications with some programs like
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Apple's FaceTime for video and Snapchat initially pictures but now video as well
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focusing almost exclusively on it no
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word yet though on when we'll have support for holographic messaging so you
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can give your friends a 360 review of whatever trendy food you just spent way
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too much money on for the sole purpose of sending a picture of it to them
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speaking of sending to them tunnel bear
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VPN allows you to send out your internet
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traffic and have the websites and services you use not know exactly where
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it came from there that was quite belabored but we eventually got there
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