Before the days of SMS, and even before the days of instant messengers like ICQ and AIM, I taught the split-screen `talk` command to my girlfriend so we could chat while I was working. We've been married for 20 years now.
The admin came to the lab from time to time and said we're hogging the workstations with the game and banned the game during daytime.
Anything like mtrek? It's still around [0], and even over telnet [1].
0: https://mtrek.com 1: telnet://mtrek.com:1701
He managed to send back a fleet or something - it was a real time game where you needed to do stuff at the right time (after sometimes a few hours). I do not remember the name of the game but it was fashionable for some time (not sure if it was text based or not)
He didn't trust IRC and other chat systems.
Is the end he got caught anyway due to sloppy opsec. Like many other hackers.
Incompatible Timesharing System:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste...
Getting Started Computing at the Al Lab by Christopher C. Stacy. MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY WORKING PAPER 235 7 September 1982:
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41180/AI_WP_2...
>6.10.3. TALK
>If you want to link to someone who is on another ITS machine, you can use the TALK program. The program is run by typing:
>*:talk uname@host
>To exit TALK terminating the conversation, the user who initiated TALK must type ^C.
>This method of comlinking is less versatile than the backnext commands, and only works across ITS machines (not locally).
>Another useful comlink program is UNTALK. UNTALK is similar to TALK but does not work across machines. However, on a display terminal, UNTALK splits the screen horizontally and allows the two people to type at the same time on their part of the screen.
The "backnext commands" he referred to would actually let you not only perform a text chat link (albeit not split screen), but also take over another user's TTY, to type into and see the output of their DDT shell and programs. There was no security other than obscurity on ITS, and that feature of linking to and sharing another user's TTY was meant for collaboration, helping, and teaching people, and also initializing and configuring output-only serial devices like line printers.
History of the Net is Important, by Keith F. Lynch:
http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACN8-1.pdf
>[...] ITS stood for the Incompatible Time-sharing System, an obvious take-off on CTSS, the Compatible Time-Sharing System. (Just as Unix is a take-off on the earlier TENEX, TWENEX, and MULTICS.)
>All four ITS machines also had UNTALK, a split-screen conferencing program similar to the later “talk” on Unix and PHONE on VMS. I was told it was written by a user whose ITS username was UNCOLA and who had committed suicide. I don’t know if it was the first program of that type, but it was the first I had seen.
Even before that, ARPANET TIPs supported a low level way of text chatting (not split screen) called a "TIP to TIP Link" (documented on page 5-4 of the "Users Guide to the Terminal IMP") where each participant bounced their packets off of a port on some host, without actually logging in or going through the host.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518273
Users Guide to the Terminal IMP (1975):
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_bbntipADA0eTerminalIMP...
Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.
So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.
It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...
...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:
http://web.mit.edu/sipb/doc/working/izephyr/html/izephyr.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)