When my wife and I were dating, she was at U Penn in Philadelphia
and I was at Emory in Atlanta. We occasionally used talk to
chat in real time. :-) This was in 1989.
Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> I loved talk when CS was running BSD on a VAX. You could see who was on
> and talk them. Very handy and it was sort of social.
>
> It's crazy how things were back then, open ports listening for all sorts
> of things. I think we were pretty unaware of how nasty the internet would
> get.
>
> On Fri, Dec 13, 2024 at 10:22:22AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > As for the motivation -- it was simple. UCB is on a hill. I lived at the
> > base of hill and I only wanted to walk up it once a day. Our office was a
> > big pool of about 20 of us next to the CAD machine room on the second floor
> > of Cory Hall. Somebody was usually in the office most nights, but not
> > everyone. We all had modems and terminals at home, but only one phone
> > line. We had 3 Vaxes in the CAD group, plus my Array Processor. So I
> > wanted to be able to ask someone like Peter or TQ to reset the AP for me if
> > I hosed it when I was working from home when I was debugging it. Plus
> > the obvious social aspects -- "hey you want go get a Pizza/Beer etc..."
> > But since we might be working on a different system, Kipps' hack was
> > useless.
> > ???
> > ???
> > ???
> > ???
> >
> > On Fri, Dec 13, 2024 at 10:14???AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Yes -- I can give this history.
> > > Kipp wrote an early version for 4.1BSD - but it is not the version in the
> > > releases. It ran on Ernie and did not do as much.
> > > I had used a different program on the PDP-10's and the ARPANET and I
> > > started over when Joy added sockets for 4.1A. I also made the infamous use
> > > of vax integers instead of network integers (and I knew better - but really
> > > did not think about until a few years later when I was at Masscomp and
> > > compiled it for the 68000 -- ugh). That version still had a couple of bugs
> > > in it (i.e. hung in the 4.1A networking code occasionally), but worked well
> > > enough on the CAD systems. I went away to a USENIX conference and while I
> > > was gone, my officemate Peter (Moore) took my code and fixed the problem,
> > > plus he put it into RCS. I gave that to Sam and that's the version that
> > > went out in 4.1C and beyond.
> > >
> > > Clem
> > >
> > >
> > > ???
> > > ???
> > >
> > > On Fri, Dec 13, 2024 at 9:29???AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> I'm curious if anyone has any history they can share about the BSD
> > >> "talk" program.
> > >>
> > >> I was fond of this back when it was still (relatively) common, but
> > >> given the way it's architected I definitely see why it fell out of use
> > >> as the Internet grew. Still, does anybody know what the history behind
> > >> it is? Initially, I thought it was written by Mike Karels, but that
> > >> was just my speculation from SCCS spelunking, and looking at the
> > >> sources from 4.2, I see RCS header strings that indicate it was
> > >> written by "moore" (Peter Moore?). talk.c says, "Written by Kipp
> > >> Hickman".
> > >>
> > >> It seems to have arrived pretty early on with respect to the
> > >> introduction of TCP/IP in BSD: the README alludes to some things
> > >> coming up in 4.1c. Clem, you seem to have had a hand in it, and are
> > >> credited (along with Peter Moore) for making it work on 4.1a.
> > >>
> > >> So I guess the question is, what was the motivation? Was it just to
> > >> have a more pleasing user-to-user communications experience, or was
> > >> discussion across the network an explicit goal? There's a note in
> > >> talk.c ("Modified to run between hosts by Peter Moore, 8/19/82") that
> > >> suggests this wasn't the original intent. Who thought up the
> > >> character-at-a-time display mode?
> > >>
> > >> Thanks for any insights.
> > >>
> > >> - Dan C.
> > >>
> > >
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat