[TUHS] BSD talk program?

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.