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Sysop Chat
- gus_massa 7y agoAre you connected now? Add a blinking caret. Perhaps it's not historically accurate, but I was expecting to see it before writing. /help /exit /welcome to see the welcome message again (/help is obvious, /exit because I want to /exit the current waiting step, and /welcome because I want to to see the /welcome message again. Perhaps also /commands) Perhaps after waiting for a minute, offer again to connect to eliza.
- enneff 7y agoA blinking caret would be historically accurate, for me anyway (my terminal had one; but everyone could configure theirs differently). Also the caret would jump to the other person's window to draw their characters :-)
- cheez 7y agoHoly shit the memories are flooding back. Nice.
- frenchie4111 7y agoThis is really cool. I wonder if chat like this would work for a dating platform. The live typing seemed more intimate to me.
- napsterbr 7y agoMy social anxiety went through the roof and I had to leave the chat after the first message. Seems a nice feature for extroverts though.
- autoexec 7y agoYeah, between my horrific spelling and constant pauses to collect my thoughts or check on other things, this would be difficult to use. Back when I would dial into BBSs I didn't have 20+ other programs running or a browser with 50+ tabs open. It was a very different experience that doesn't translate well to a modern world with a million things demanding our attention.
- GrinningFool 7y agoThey can demand all they want. Where you give your focus is up to you though.
- rsynnott 7y agoI believe ICQ used to have this (at least as an option). It never really made the leap to other IM platforms; people didn't like it.
- filleokus 7y agoI also jumped in and tried it with /random. Was really neat! Awesome work! The conversation felt really different compared to writing in a normal chat. I think it would be an interesting "social experiment" (ugh...) to have a chat feature like this in a dating app, perhaps with Snapchat-like message deletion. It feels like it would remove some of that facade you can put up when you have time to think and compose the message.
- lowtolerance 7y agoI’m in touch to this day with a friend that I made through sysop chat. Kind of hard to believe that was 25+ years ago!
- lxe 7y ago> when the other person typed you didn't need to wait for them to hit "send", rather you would see their typing immediately. When they pressed a key, I could see that key press happen right away. Google Wave anyone?
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoTeens are now using Google Docs as a chat app: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hottest-chat-app-teens-google-docs/584857/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hotte...
- AceJohnny2 7y agoI hear that, kind of in protest when Google announced Yet Another Chat Service (Allo? Duo?), Googlers created a list of all the "chat" systems supported across Google's ecosystem. It was in the high teens? More? Stuff like Sheets chat, Youtube chat...
- vageli 7y agoThe students are probably motivated by network-level blocking of common chat apps but not schoolwork necessities like Google docs.
- AceJohnny2 7y agoDon't add salt to the wound. Every time I get frustrated with my company's email system, I dream of what could've been.
- V-eHGsd_ 7y agoyou dream of google wave? I was at google when wave was released, I tried to use it for a number of collaborative projects (what would otherwise have been large email threads). it just didn't work.
- 7y ago
- phil21 7y agoThis was great. Had a quick chat with someone even more old school than I, brought back quite a few memories of my early discovery days.
- jascii 7y agoNice, just gave it a try! We used to hang out on random unixen, often using the "talk" command that had a similar split screen. I remember the "me" window to be on the bottom though!
- ipython 7y agoAhh. Fun memories of giving friends shell access and using ytalk to chat. Apparently after all these years it has a web presence: http://ytalk.ourproject.org/ http://ytalk.ourproject.org/
- a-dub 7y agodoes it play a PC speaker rendition of "sweet child o' mine"?
- allenu 7y agoI remember these so well. I remember logging into someone's BBS and immediately getting social anxiety when the SysOp would randomly start chatting with me. (The reason I'm using a BBS is so I don't have to directly socialize with someone!) It also made me realize they could watch my every movement on the BBS.
- VectorLock 7y agoWatch people use your BBS was the best part about being a SysOp.
- gabeio 7y agoAOL AIM actually had a feature similar to this, in each chat you could enable "RealTime-IM" and show what you were typing as you were typing to the other person. Which ended up being nice that it was an optional feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_(software)#AIM_real-time_IM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_(software)#AIM_real-time_I...
- MrStonedOne 7y agoNeeds a no-javascript fallback to remind us to whitelist the site.
- bruceb 7y agoI couldn't stop hitting the phantom return key to send a msg. I agree with others, maybe switch the order. Other person on top. But was fun. also, you are going to expose my weak spelling.
- mattbillenstein 7y agoI'll report it works pretty well from an airplane's wifi connection!
- castis 7y agowell that was super cool. i love that it feels older, i wasnt around for any of the BBS action back in the day but getting involved with something similar would be cool. any other places on the internet like this anyone know of?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chrissnell 7y agoI'm sure I've told this story here before but when I was in high school in 1992, we were allowed to go off-campus for lunch. Me and a buddy would each go home to our respective houses and hop on a local multi-line BBS and chat with each other just for the novelty of it. It's hard to explain just how amazing real-time chat was in 1992.
- xenophonf 7y agoI remember, in 1991 or 1992, chatting with some Navy guy on some Texan BBS, dialed in from Chicago through my cousin's Tymnet account. While the technical stuff was astounding, what really blew my mind was how the Navy guy treated me—like an adult, a peer. I think that encounter really ignited my passion for computing and networking tech.
- Angostura 7y agoI remember in 1991 dialling in to a BBS in Latvia and chatting to someone there. Felt pretty astonishing.
- kazinator 7y agoLet me fix that for you: > Back in mid-##80s## before anyone I knew had an Internet connection, a few of us had modems and would use them to call bulletin board systems via the phone line. Internet connections were common place in the middle 90's, though perhaps not broadband, permanently connected ones. There was a lot of dial-up. > The chat wasn't quite like chats are now. It was split-screen, and there were only two participants. Sysop-only chat is squarely 1980's. I already used multi-participant chat dial-up bulletin boards as far back as 1988. Didn't even have to call long-distance; there was one in Vancouver. By the mid 1990's, that stuff was passé. In the mid 1990's, you could PPP/SLIP to connect to the Internet over dial-up, and use IRC to chat with people all over the world (either run your own local client, or telnet/ssh into a provider's shell account). I compiled an IRC client for the first time in 1994 and was just amazed: I'm talking with people all over the flippin' world! This guy is in the Netherlands! Another one in Australia... wow! Vast number of channels and users, whoa. In 1995, I was running Linux 1.3.x, with SMP support: an ASUS motherboard with two 100 MHz Pentiums. I had a 28.8 kbps modem, and had dial-up Internet access (PPP).
- autoexec 7y agoThat was still an active BBS scene in the mid 90s. Even as Fidonet grew and users left to spend more time connected to the web. The internet, especially in those days, just couldn't deliver the same experience of connecting with a bunch of other people (mostly) in your own area code. I met a lot of friends in those days and being able to get together for outings and events was really fun. I can't imagine meetups like that now. Maybe there are local facebook groups that scratch that same itch?
- kazinator 7y agoEverything in my comment is 100% historically accurate. Yes, there was a BBS scene, but it was a fading retro thing. That's besides the point; the blog describes technology that existed in the middle 1980's, and claims that was the state of the art in the middle 1990's. Nobody had Internet, chat was for two people, one of whom was the sysop and so on. While those systems still existed, they were just retro holdovers from the 80's. I contracted for a pay-per-click subscription website running on Linux, in 1994. This had customers. I know because I wrote the billing system to charge authenticated users for the mining/prospecting-related info they accessed. This business still exists today in some shape: http://infomine.com http://infomine.com In 1994 it employed some half dozen full-time staff to do the research and keep the database updated. I knew many people who were Internet connected. I communicated via e-mail. In 1995, Windows 95 came out. It came with a TCP/IP stack: no more bolted-on networking. And, in a follow up release, it bundled Internet Explorer. Those pieces were there for a reason.
- h0l0cube 7y agoReally thank you for this. I'd forgotten the thrill of conversing with a complete stranger, from anywhere in the world, sight unseen. I hope it catches on. A serious question though, do the actual conversations cross the server or are they direct p2p?
- bemmu 7y agoThey cross the server, but I use encryption to send the keystrokes. Public/private key pair is generated by collecting some randomness from the client, and used to transmit characters. It's the last function in https://sysop.chat/net.js https://sysop.chat/net.js
- h0l0cube 7y agoMy knowledge of crypto might be completely backwards, but I think it's normal to use the asymmetric pair to then communicate a symmetric key between both parties. Also, I'm not sure what cryptico is doing under the hood, but if it's not communicating a new IV/offset for each key stroke message, I imagine you could compare two messages with the same keystroke and it would encrypt to exactly the same cypher. I really hope this project grows, and that I can visit it again... or even chat to people I know in this format. I really enjoyed /random, it was fun making friends with complete strangers. The last time I had that feeling was in the golden age of ICQ, and when I used to visit actual BBSes in the 90s.
- bemmu 7y agoI was also concerned that the messages would be the same for the same keystrokes, but looking into it it seems it also contains a timestamp, so each message is different. I'm sure it's not bulletproof, but I think a huge improvement over plain text. Also I don't store any logs of sent keystroke messages.
- mikeash 7y agoYou could brute force that fairly easily if you know approximately when the message was sent. Still a lot better than being able to see it right in your packet sniffer, of course.
- jmccarthy 7y agoWWIV F10, my fingers still remember
- wenbin 7y agoIn early 2000, QQ [1] had a product feature like this - realtime typing & chatting. It was mainly for two intimate people to use (两人世界). A few years ago, Tencent sunset this feature. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ
- grenoire 7y agoI just had someone narrate a text adventure to me, ultimately it didn't get too far with respect to the story itself; but it was a very fond experience. Thanks, Narrator!
- jasonkester 7y agoWow, that's way more advanced than anything I remember using back in the day. In my 300 baud C64 days, chatting online was done in full duplex mode, where everything either party typed would appear on both screens at once, at the end of the current line. It's just a terminal, so there was only one place for the caret to be. You'd type your thing, then end with two carriage returns to signify that you were finished. There was nothing to stop you from typing out of turn, except that your characters would appear mixed in with the other guy's so that neither of you could read what either had written. It was just a social construct, typing into an input stream in turn. And it worked nicely. Fun times.
- makach 7y agoyes, some chats you typed in the same stream -- indeed -- worked like a charm
- Aloha 7y agoThis reminds me of unix talk. Particularly of ytalk
- makach 7y agohaha, that was great! thanks for the implementation and the fun. Actually I have exactly the same background as OP, and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this. Now, is this a decent anonymous chat? Can this be used through TOR to establish untraceable comms?
- erikbye 7y agoThe sysop interrupting your session to chat was the most frustrating thing about using BBSes.
- microcolonel 7y agoCould use a way to return to the main menu without a mouse click. Seems great until your fellow stranger drops out and you're reminded that this is a webapp.
- rahkiin 7y agoThis is great. Had a very nice chat with another dev from HN. Felt novel, for me, to have it fully real time. No waiting for 'is typing...' wondering what corrections are being made. I expected to make a lot of errors in typing, but after a couple of lines I started thinking more about what I type before I type it, which is not a habit for me. Thank you!
- mmccaff 7y agoLove it! Thanks for sharing. I remember when split-screen chat started becoming popular in the BBS scene. Being able to type at the same time as the other person was groundbreaking! :) Prior to that, if you wanted to interrupt the other person or break in with a thought, you'd just hit enter a bunch of times or 'fjskdfklsdhfjsd' until you could take over the conversation. It was like if two people were chatting in a text editor. I also remember versions of chat where each character would cycle through different sets of ansi colors.. harder to read and totally useless, but looked cool.. As someone else said, a blinking cursor would be nice. I got a little lost for the first few seconds without it. Any comments on the tech that you used to build this?
- mescalito 7y agoThis reminded me a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BiModem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BiModem - Fun times