[ih] Origin of 'talk' command

[Brian Dear]

I've placed PLATO's TERM-talk terminal-to-terminal talking capability to 29 
years ago today (see www.platopeople.com/termtalk.html) but I'm curious if 
there were other inter-terminal talking facilities up and running prior to 
that.   Most likely candidate I figured was Unix's "talk" command.

- Brian


At 11:24 AM 12/19/02 -0800, Joe Touch wrote:
>Joe Touch wrote:
>>Brian Dear wrote:
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>Does anyone know the date that the Unix "talk" command originally 
>>>appeared, and on what version/platform of Unix, and also if there's an 
>>>RFC on it (I've not been able to locate one)?
>>
>>I would not expect an RFC: talk is between users on a single machine. 
>>RFCs tend to require inter-machine communication ;-)
>>I.e., this may be Unix history, but not quite Internet history (though 
>>given we don't get that much traffic, and there's some overlap in 
>>expertise, it seems OK to ask).
>
>FWIW, it _has_ been a while since I used that one...
>
>It seems that talk works between machines these days. Though looking at 
>the source code, there's less a 'protocol' than a TCP stream between two 
>endpoints.
>
>I.e., it's nowhere as complex as telnet, which is spec'd as an RFC.
>
>Joe
>
>