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I liked ICQ (before it was bastardized) a lot better than chat clients that came after. You could control your visibility by person or group. You could actually search your history and carry it with you over the eons. It was lightweight, fairly unobtrusive and ad-free.

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And it had a sort of "live chat" function. You could see your conversation partner's keystrokes in real-time, including typos and corrections. This has, as far as I know, never been introduced in other chat clients...

That’s how it worked on dial up BBSs too. But it was one buffer with a convention of entering two newlines when you were done typing.

There was/is Unix talk(1).

> You could actually search your history and carry it with you over the eons. It was lightweight, fairly unobtrusive and ad-free.

All of that is still true of the chat protocol that came before and still exists, IRC.

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