[ih] Chat room and forum archives

[Brian Dear]

The PLATO system offered live character-by-typewritten-character-including-backspaces chat rooms through the Talkomatic program, released in 1973. It was something to behold to see, say, six different people all typing at the same time on separate lines, each character-by-character—everything was live. Typos? No problem, just press backspace and edit what you typed. Users got to see everything live. None of this Internet/Unix-style line-based online chat, this was all character-by-character. :-)

Talkomatic offered multiple channels (akin to CB radio at the time) and multiple people could participate in a channel. Eventually you could create private channels for chats with a specific group of people. Also in 1973 PLATO launched TERM-talk, which was also live, 1:1, character-by-typewritten-character-including-backspaces, instant messaging. (I met my wife in a TERM-talk in 1984, a relatively late phenom in the PLATO world but wildly early by Internet standards.)

Alas, I doubt there’s much if anything in the way of “archives” still in existence for TERM-talk or Talkomatic (though both programs still run fine on the Cyber1.org <http://cyber1.org/> PLATO system), as it was all live and ephemeral the way any phonecall would be.

- Brian


Brian Dear
Author, “The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture,” Pantheon Books 2017.



> On Aug 31, 2022, at 4:53 PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Something you wouldn't think would be a problem:
> 
> I'm planning out my next novel, and I want to have a character haunting the
> chat rooms and forums on investing, around 1995 and on. I don't want to
> quote anything or dox anyone -- I just want to get the tone and format back
> then, as well as the topics they were talking about.
> 
> The Wayback Machine seems to have started at the end of 1996. Does anyone
> have links to earlier archives?
> -- 
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