How did 1973′ Talkomatic chat room work without Internet having been invented yet?
In: Technology
Now that’s one I can answer. I was on the PLATO IV project at U of I Chicago starting in 1973.
There were 2 programs — Talk-o-matic and Notes — that were written by *high school students* and were sort of dismissed by the senior admins. See? Old people *for random values of “old”* often miss the wave.
David Frankel and David Woolsey (I may have the names wrong, this was 50+ years ago) wrote 2 of the very first social media programs.
The reason this worked before the InterNet was because PLATO IV was hosted on a *massive* CDC Dual Cyber 6600. And it was connected to over [1,000 terminals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)) located all over the U.S and in many other countries, including the Soviet Union. This was realtime computing and The Davids understood it better than the Olds did. It was a form of [star network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_network). It was extremely cool. There was literally *nothing* like it anywhere else in the world.
Good Times!
ETA: And I even had 2 of my students meet via Talk-o-matic and eventually marry. People are people.
Lots of computers and machines communicated, sometimes even digitally decades before the internet was widespread. Sometimes using telephone lines, sometimes using coaxial cables.
Internet dates back to the ’60s. You’re probably equating it with the World Wide Web, which uses the Internet (and its advent opened the door for virtually everyone to get online) but is a separate thing. When people talk about the internet happening in the mid-’90s, they mean the web.
Computers were talking over networks long before “the internet” was created. But not all of those networks were compatible. The reason the protocols we refer to as “the internet” were created is people saw stuff like the Talkomatic chat room and thought it’d be nice if there was a way every computer in the world could be connected that way.
One way to think of it is that Talkomatic is, metaphorically, computers speaking French with each other. There were other networks and that was like computers speaking Chinese with each other. The internet was like Esperanto, some people got together and tried to make a “language” that all computers could agree to speak and that would be flexible enough even things they hadn’t thought of doing yet could use it.
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