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Comment by colecut | Hacker News Reader

My 10 year old self spent many many hours chatting with "internet friends" using PowWow..

It's the only chat that I can think of that communicated in a continuous stream of characters... your messages were sent letter by letter as you typed them, not all at once after you hit 'enter'. It made slow typers painfully obvious.

I remember being able to play audio clips in the chat that others could hear as well.. This was also around the same time that MP3s started to be used and passed around. What a magical time.

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> It's the only chat that I can think of that communicated in a continuous stream of characters...

Plain old unix "talk" does this

ICQ did too, IIRC, before it was integrated into AIM.

It did not when I used it, which was before it was integrated into AIM.

Was heavy ICQ user with low UID, rather sure it didn't.

Icq's chat feature definitely did around 97/98/99. I remember it being different from the IM feature in that way.

I used ICQ in it's original form and i don't think it did

That was a setting and not on by default iirc. I had a 6-digit UID (edit: UIN, dammit), and I clearly remember activating it because I found it cool.

Edit: googling it I found someone else that remembered it: https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/2w4evp/comme...

Edit2: https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/10-reasons-to-switch-forwa... number 4

wow, I had forgotten all about UIDs completely, and as soon as you said that, my 6-digit UID came right back to me like yesterday (260388). bizarre!

It also didn't work for people who were behind NAT, I think, and leaked the remote parties IP... so there may have been many people who used ICQ at that time but never saw that functionality.

I like it, and to this day there are some friends that I talk to using talk by sshing into a common host, just because the realtime typing is nicer.

I remember speaking on there to Americans on Christmas Day. PowWow was brilliant. There was a phrase or series of letters one could type to play a song or make a beat or something too. It had text to speech even back then.

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