The Talk Client and Server
This survey of different chat programs begins by looking at talk. This is arguably the grandfather of all network-aware chat programs. It is certainly the program that served as an inspiration for IRC—much the same way as both IRC and talk have provided the fundamental ideas used in newer chat and instant messaging protocols, such as ICQ and AIM.
talk is a very simple, basic chat program. All the client does is establish a link between the terminals of two computer users. The users can either reside on the same computer or on different, networked computers. Everything that one user types into his terminal will instantly be shown on the other user's terminal and vice versa.
There are several versions of the talk command ...
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