I don’t mind this behaviour. It can be difficult to coordinate when you don’t know whether the other person is done yet or not. Back in the old days we used to, as the end of the article says, send lots of little bits of text to deal with this (to older/less internet-savvy people’s great annoyance, as they treated chat just like email, and would be furious when their wall of text was responded to with half a sentence!) but it made the chat very disjointed and you’d end up having to deal with multiple simultaneous stands of conversation. Anyway, the real problem is people who ask “what were you typing?” when you delete your message or take a long time. You don’t want to know!

I’ve never used a ‘live’ chat like he describes but I really like the idea. Is there anything modern that provides that?