At the largest CS schools there was some use of a federated Zephyr system for a while from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. While Zephyr the protocol isn't gre

At the largest CS schools there was some use of a federated Zephyr system for a while from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. While Zephyr the protocol isn't great, the culture was. And being based on an open protocol and Open Source codebase — since it came out of MIT Project Athena — lots of fun hacks were written atop it too. Also, the primary client "zwgc" (Zephyr WindowGram Client) could run reasonably on a low end workstation like a DECstation 3100 or SPARCstation 1 (8MB RAM, 25MHz RISC CPU, thin Ethernet or SLIP/PPP via dialup). None of this megabytes-of-HTML-and-JavaScript, gigabytes-of-RAM nonsense.