How did 1973′ Talkomatic chat room work without Internet having been invented yet?
In: Technology
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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