> No really, we had this. On the Vax it was DEC$PHONE and allowed up to four (or was it five?) simultaneous participants in a real-time text chat channel. If yo

> No really, we had this. On the Vax it was DEC$PHONE and allowed up to four (or was it five?) simultaneous participants in a real-time text chat channel. If you “phoned” someone using their account name on the system then a “ringing” text alert would appear in the middle of whatever else they were doing on their terminal. Awfully like getting @here alerts in Slack in the modern era. Seems like an oversight not mentioning IRC in this section. > Like DEC$PHONE you had talk I believe? Instant messenger but far more network friendly and so closer to what we think of today. We also had (still have...) Zephyr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol) That's what we used primarily in the CS dept at my university in the early 90s and the tech staff were still using it at my first job in the late 90s.