View source for Talker

===Early Internet talkers===
In the school year of 1983–1984, Mark Jenks and Todd Krause, two students at Washington High School in [[Milwaukee]], wrote a software program for talking among a group of people.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Brandon De Hoyos |title=The Early Messengers |url=http://im.about.com/od/imbasics/a/imhistory_2.htm |access-date=2008-03-14 |archive-date=2008-09-03 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080903000244/http://im.about.com/od/imbasics/a/imhistory_2.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> They used the [[PDP-11]] at the [[Milwaukee Public Schools]] (MPS) central office. After searching around the PDP-11 files and directories, Mark found the PDP-11 program [[Talk (Unix)|talk]], and decided that they could do better. The system had approximately 40 300–2400 [[Bit rate|bit per second]] [[modem]]s attached to it, with a single phone number and a [[Hunting (telephony)|hunt group]]. The talk program was named TALK and was written to handle many options that are seen in [[IRC]] today: tables, private messages, actions, moderators and inviting to tables. Another talk server called NUTS,<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.ogham.demon.co.uk/nuts.html |title=NUTS home page |access-date=2018-02-20 |archive-date=2018-11-04 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181104033335/http://www.ogham.demon.co.uk/nuts.html |url-status=dead }}</ref> which stood for Neil's Unix Talk Server, was released in 1993 and became fairly popular on Unix systems. Its command system was broadly based on the Unaxcess BBS and being room based it took a lot of inspiration from MUDs too. The source code was given away and became the basis of a huge number of variants and rewrites during the 1990s.

''Cat Chat'' was the first Internet / [[JANET]] talker, created in 1990.{{R|tmc}}