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.

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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

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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.