I’m not obsolete yet!

Hey good buddy, did you know that CB radio, or citizens’ band radio, is the great-grandfather to synchronous conferencing, also known as online chatting. In the 70’s you couldn’t get away from CB radios, they were everywhere from the trucker’s cab to mom’s trying to keep tabs on their kids. They took cruising in the 80’s to a whole new level where you could not only drive around all night on 60 cent a gallon gas, but you could chat any other car on the strip without actually seeing who you were chatting with. The first online dating? Could be. But at least it was voice and you knew that the person on the other end was the right gender.

In 1980, CompuServe executive Alexander Trevor unveiled to the public the CompuServe CB Simulator. CompuServe, the first major commercial online service provider for the United States, created the program with the then popular CB radio in mind; the program had forty “channels,” based on the number of channels used by CB radio, as well as CB radio’s controls such as “squelch,” “tune” and “monitor.” The CB Simulator laid the foundation for today’s online chatting in many important ways, particularly in its use of channels; the forty channels based on CB radio’s would later evolve into chat rooms, thus setting up the schematics for what we know as internet chatting. The CompuServe’s CB Simulator gained a great deal of popularity, even being used to host the first online multimedia conference in 1995 with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones; as of 1995, CompuServe had over three million members making it the then largest online service provider.

A few years after CompuServe launched its groundbreaking program, PlayNet integrated chatting into one if its most popular online games—chess. From 1984 to 1987, New York based PlayNet offered online service to owners of the Commodore 64 computer. One of the perks offered by the company was its extensive list of games, which were only available to subscribers of PlayNet. When PlayNet programmers realized the versatility of integrating chat into its popular chess game, they began work to make their idea a reality. Their hours of development paid off as thousands of PlayNet users began taking advantage of chess-chat. As was the fate of many pioneering online companies, PlayNet experienced a short lifespan. In the late 1980s, the company was purchased by Quantum Computer Services, who took PlayNet’s online program and used it to base their own online service, named Quantum Link. In 1989, Quantum Computer Services changed the name of its online service to America Online.

America Online launched its chat service primarily to function as a social network, integrating many features that CompuServe’s chat service did not have. One such improvement was the use of proprietary software instead of the terminal program used by CB Simulator. With the proprietary software, AOL provided its subscribers use of a graphical user interface, or GUI, that proved to be more user-friendly than the outdated command lines of past service providers. AOL also further refined the chat room, expanding it into a more diverse and developed communication tool. Users were now able to take advantage of “private rooms,” “conference rooms” and “auditoriums.” The private rooms, usually created by a single user, accommodated up to twenty-three people and were not moderated by AOL. Conference rooms, necessitating AOL’s permission to setup, held up to forty-eight people and were moderated by AOL. Auditoriums, also created in consent by AOL, comprised of a “stage” and unlimited amount of “rows.” The happenings on stage were viewable by every member of the auditorium chat room, while the separate rows were permitted to converse with one another–up to twenty-seven members of a single row. With these developments in chat rooms and emphasis on users and communication between users, AOL soon became the leader in the internet chatting field with as many as ten million subscribers in 1999.

During the summer of 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) at Finland’s University of Oulu. At the time, Oikarinen was employed by the Department of Information Processing Science, where in his spare time he began development of a communications program meant to interface with OuluBox, a Finnish Bulletin Board System (BBS). IRC, designed specifically for group communication, offered the facilitation of channels that could be set to allow only pre-authorized users to join and use, whereas OuluBox was designed more for one-on-one communication. After the initial development, Oikarinen continued to refine IRC and began to pass it along to anyone who would use it. As the active users began to grow in Finland, Oikarinen set his sights for the United States. After meeting a few interested parties through a MIT messaging system, he was able to develop a small base of IRC users in the states. The system soon grew in popularity, and the number of servers running IRC outside of Finland climbed rapidly.

No one is really sure when it happened for the first time, but I would bet IRC saw the very first use of A/S/L by a lonely male nerd, which was promptly responded to with 19/F/Philly by another lonely male nerd trying to be funny, or desperate.

1996 saw the release of the first internet-wide instant messaging service: ICQ. Developed by Mirabilis, a technology company based in Israel, the program’s designers sought to give non-UNIX users (primarily those using the Windows operating system) the ability to instant message and chat in real time online—a need that had yet to be addressed. ICQ was released as a free downloadable program, and offered a number of advantages over other instant messaging services, including file exchange, email, and a long list of games. Within just two years of its launch, Mirabilis’ ICQ had become one of the most popular instant messaging services online; AOL, seeing the vast potential, approached the executives of Mirabilis and offered $407 million to purchase the company along with ICQ. Although ICQ is now owned and operated by AOL, it retains many of the features that made it so popular with users across the globe, while continuing efforts to develop and streamline the service.

With the evolution of online chat came important advances in instant messaging. AOL’s AIM was no longer the dominant service, as MSN and Yahoo both had introduced popular programs that many found to be comparable or better than AOL’s. MSN Messenger, now known as Windows Live Messenger, was introduced in 1998 as a basic messaging program that offered users a chat window and a list of contacts. It has since been updated every year to offer a user-friendly format incorporating the most important advances in instant messaging technology. Yahoo Messenger, introduced in 1998, has also come a long way from the simple text box and contact list of its beginnings to a much more user-centric environment complete with avatars, customizable message windows, and integration with other Yahoo services such as email and webcam hosting at live.yahoo.com.

Online chatting has evolved from text only and technology now allows for both video and audio to be added into the mix. One popular service, TeamSpeak, works much like IRC but with one important difference: TeamSpeak users incorporate headsets with microphones so that instead of typing, members within a channel are able to actually speak with one another. Other services, such as video chat and videoconferencing, take advantage of both audio and video to successfully replicate face-to-face communication through a webcam and speaker system.

Today, many different websites offer chatting services such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and the latest entry into the messaging field, Facebook Chat.

For us old people who actually used CBs to chat it’s been interesting watch the technology evolve to the point where 35,000 people can respond to your wildest whims with just a few button presses on a keyboard. Too bad so much of it is still A/S/L.