Sysop Chat
bemmu.com
bemmu.com
Add a blinking caret. Perhaps it's not historically accurate, but I was expecting to see it before writing.
/help /exit /welcome to see the welcome message again (/help is obvious, /exit because I want to /exit the current waiting step, and /welcome because I want to to see the /welcome message again. Perhaps also /commands)
Perhaps after waiting for a minute, offer again to connect to eliza.
Google Wave anyone?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hotte...
Stuff like Sheets chat, Youtube chat...
I was at google when wave was released, I tried to use it for a number of collaborative projects (what would otherwise have been large email threads). it just didn't work.
It was a horrible resource hog on the browser, but I thinkn that could have been solved.
But I'm curious if you can recall specific reasons why it didn't work. As I recall, for me it was just a lack of network effect.
The screen is split into two (separated by dashes). You type in your area, which is shown in quasi-real-time to the other party, while you see their keystrokes in the opposite partition.
In my 300 baud C64 days, chatting online was done in full duplex mode, where everything either party typed would appear on both screens at once, at the end of the current line. It's just a terminal, so there was only one place for the caret to be.
You'd type your thing, then end with two carriage returns to signify that you were finished. There was nothing to stop you from typing out of turn, except that your characters would appear mixed in with the other guy's so that neither of you could read what either had written.
It was just a social construct, typing into an input stream in turn. And it worked nicely.
Fun times.
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indeed
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worked like a charm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_(software)#AIM_real-time_I...
The conversation felt really different compared to writing in a normal chat.
I think it would be an interesting "social experiment" (ugh...) to have a chat feature like this in a dating app, perhaps with Snapchat-like message deletion. It feels like it would remove some of that facade you can put up when you have time to think and compose the message.
At least you can block paste on mobile platforms and make them write it in letter by letter :)
I remember when split-screen chat started becoming popular in the BBS scene. Being able to type at the same time as the other person was groundbreaking! :) Prior to that, if you wanted to interrupt the other person or break in with a thought, you'd just hit enter a bunch of times or 'fjskdfklsdhfjsd' until you could take over the conversation. It was like if two people were chatting in a text editor.
I also remember versions of chat where each character would cycle through different sets of ansi colors.. harder to read and totally useless, but looked cool..
As someone else said, a blinking cursor would be nice. I got a little lost for the first few seconds without it.
Any comments on the tech that you used to build this?
A serious question though, do the actual conversations cross the server or are they direct p2p?
I really hope this project grows, and that I can visit it again... or even chat to people I know in this format. I really enjoyed /random, it was fun making friends with complete strangers. The last time I had that feeling was in the golden age of ICQ, and when I used to visit actual BBSes in the 90s.
I'm sure it's not bulletproof, but I think a huge improvement over plain text. Also I don't store any logs of sent keystroke messages.
I agree with others, maybe switch the order. Other person on top. But was fun.
also, you are going to expose my weak spelling.
I expected to make a lot of errors in typing, but after a couple of lines I started thinking more about what I type before I type it, which is not a habit for me.
Thank you!
Now, is this a decent anonymous chat? Can this be used through TOR to establish untraceable comms?
I wonder if chat like this would work for a dating platform. The live typing seemed more intimate to me.
Seems a nice feature for extroverts though.
i love that it feels older, i wasnt around for any of the BBS action back in the day but getting involved with something similar would be cool.
any other places on the internet like this anyone know of?
> Back in mid-##80s## before anyone I knew had an Internet connection, a few of us had modems and would use them to call bulletin board systems via the phone line.
Internet connections were common place in the middle 90's, though perhaps not broadband, permanently connected ones. There was a lot of dial-up.
> The chat wasn't quite like chats are now. It was split-screen, and there were only two participants.
Sysop-only chat is squarely 1980's. I already used multi-participant chat dial-up bulletin boards as far back as 1988. Didn't even have to call long-distance; there was one in Vancouver. By the mid 1990's, that stuff was passé.
In the mid 1990's, you could PPP/SLIP to connect to the Internet over dial-up, and use IRC to chat with people all over the world (either run your own local client, or telnet/ssh into a provider's shell account). I compiled an IRC client for the first time in 1994 and was just amazed: I'm talking with people all over the flippin' world! This guy is in the Netherlands! Another one in Australia... wow! Vast number of channels and users, whoa.
In 1995, I was running Linux 1.3.x, with SMP support: an ASUS motherboard with two 100 MHz Pentiums. I had a 28.8 kbps modem, and had dial-up Internet access (PPP).
Yes, there was a BBS scene, but it was a fading retro thing.
That's besides the point; the blog describes technology that existed in the middle 1980's, and claims that was the state of the art in the middle 1990's. Nobody had Internet, chat was for two people, one of whom was the sysop and so on. While those systems still existed, they were just retro holdovers from the 80's.
I contracted for a pay-per-click subscription website running on Linux, in 1994. This had customers. I know because I wrote the billing system to charge authenticated users for the mining/prospecting-related info they accessed. This business still exists today in some shape: http://infomine.com In 1994 it employed some half dozen full-time staff to do the research and keep the database updated.
I knew many people who were Internet connected. I communicated via e-mail.
In 1995, Windows 95 came out. It came with a TCP/IP stack: no more bolted-on networking. And, in a follow up release, it bundled Internet Explorer. Those pieces were there for a reason.
The blog does not claim this, full stop. The author says "before anyone I knew had an Internet connection", describing a personal experience, presumably during his childhood or teenage years ("I just had it open during the night, so that my parents could use the phone line during the day").
Why attack the author's personal experience and anecdotes?
fwiw, my own experience mirrors the author's exactly. In my area (Philly) there were around two hundred single-line hobbyist boards in the mid 90s, meaning ~1993-1997. It was not a "fading retro thing" quite yet, and as a teenager I didn't personally know any frequent internet users until at least 1996.
For historical context, Yahoo wasn't incorporated until 1995. Internet Explorer v1 was released in mid-1995 and wasn't even initially bundled with Windows 95. Widespread home internet adoption took a couple years, and (at least in my area) dial-up hobbyist BBS's only started to dwindle in the late 90s, while the commercial ones (many-line majorbbs/worldgroup systems) transitioned to become dial-up ISPs.
For another data point, I developed a couple BBS doorgames from 1999-2003. The BBS scene was definitely dying off at that point, but nonetheless I still sold several hundred registrations for my games during that period.
To quote William Gibson: "the future is already here, just not evenly distributed"
It's like saying that all we had in 1995 was cable TV for watching Prince, Madonna, Tears for Fears and Van Halen videos. No; you were just too stoned to remember that that was actually in 1985. You're 50, not 39, like you think, haha.
My father's job provided him with a callback modem hookup, so we got on the Internet in, I think, 1995. This was a rarity and the phone bills would have been pretty bad if my family'd had to pay them.
By 1995 I had a permanently on ISDN 128 Kbps line. My ISP even gave me my own public Class C netblock with that line!