Timeline of Instant Messengers
02Dec08
Every single time I describe my thesis to geeks, I inevitably get the response: “Ooh, how far are you going back? As far as UNIX TALK?“
Er. Yeah, something like that.
I posted the first section of a paper I wrote on the topic (which I am very much cannibalizing for my thesis) eons ago, but I thought I’d show you guys the timeline I am working with so that you can a) be enlightened by just how far back IM goes and/or b) tell me of big important things I’m missing. Yes? Love you too.
- 1965 – .SAVED written for CTSS
- 1974 – Term-talk for PLATO
- Late 1970s – talk for BSD Unix
- 1981 – BITNET’s MSG developed–would eventually turn into IRC
- 1983 – Unix talk updated (renamed ytalk) to use split windows
- 1983 – Project Athena – Zephyr
- 1983 – The Internet is Born
- 1985 – On Line Messages for Quantum Link for Commodore 64
- 1985 – SMS is considered in a GSM subgroup as a potential service
- 1992 – First SMS sent
- 1993 – SMS commercially deployed in Sweden, the US, Norway, and UK
- 1994 – Q-Link turns into AOL
- 1996 – ICQ released for Windows 95. Has 12 million users in 2 years.
- 1997 – AIM becomes available to non-AOL users
- 1999 – MSN IM released
- 1999 – AOL tries to sue people for the term “Buddy List”
- 2000 – IMUnified, a consortium of IM companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, start pushing for an interoperable protocol
- 2000 – Trillian released the first version (0.6) that could connect to AIM, ICQ, and MSN.
- 2000 – Jabber released publicly
- 2002 – Patent for ICQ
- 2005 – Microsoft and Yahoo made their clients interoperable, marking the beginning of the end of the IM wars
Filed under: Thesis | 6 Comments
Tags: History of Science, history of technology, history of the internet, IM, instant messaging, Internet, internet history, internet studies
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I see IRC mentioned in 1981. Are you including it’s later development, or steering clear of chat altogether, even if it has IM-type features?
P.S. Hi!
My definition of IM (which I should have totally included) is communication that is more person-to-person (one person talking to another on AIM) than location-based (having an IRC chatroom where people come and go). So yes, IRC is purposefully being neglected…
When I was in college in the early ’90s we used a version of Talk called ytalk that would allow more than two people to chat with each other at one time and it would split the screen for each participant which could be annoying at the low resolutions that we were running, but I digress.
We also used the write command to send text to other user’s terminals. It was primitive, but it served the same purpose as IM. And then there was the wall command which on systems with improperly configured permissions could be used by a normal user to send a message to all users on the system. Oh the memories.
lots of BBS systems had a chat feature that worked similarly to talk. most of the boards i called were single-line systems, so the only time i used it was when the sysop wanted to chat. it would interrupt whatever you were doing and split the screen temporarily.
rather than google this, i suggest just asking jason scott.
also, i used to chat in open terminal sessions with friends before transferring files using ymodem! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YMODEM
Dang, coolest thesis ever.
Project Athena’s zephyr wasn’t actually implemented to 1987 or so. Some of the
people who did the implementing are still local and can be gotten in touch with.