[ih] Origin of 'talk' command

[David P. Reed]

Englebart's NLS is one of the most important pieces of prior art here.   It 
was working well in 1967.   Licklider described his use of the original NLS 
in Scientific American in 1967.

DTSS had something like this before 1970.   We had stuff like this at MIT 
on nearly every timesharing system (including CTSS on the 7094,  Multics, 
ITS).  I think I helped build such a talk program on Multics as part of the 
SIPB system that I worked on under Bob Frankston's direction in 
19769-1970.   I helped write several others inter-user communications 
programs on Multics.   I'm pretty sure I used it on CTSS in 1968.  I think 
terminal-to-terminal talk was available on CP/CMS as well.

I've asked Bob Frankston to corroborate.  Bob probably can't post to ih, 
but I'll repost what he says about early terminal-to-terminal talk programs.

All of these systems had "who" commands or otherwise let you list the users 
online as well.  Some let you check who was on other machines, and some let 
you talk live across machine boundaries.


At 11:26 AM 12/19/2002 -0800, Brian Dear wrote:
>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
>>
>
>