Cat Chat

Cat Chat was the first ever talker created for the internet in 1990, and was created by Chris Thompson, who used the name "Cat" when using the talker.

Whilst the first talker was invented in 1984, until 1990 they were only available on small intranet services.

History

Cat Chat was created by Chris "Cat" Thompson, who was a university student at University of Warwick in England, as LPmud but without any of the monsters or the game element. It commonly had about 20 users on it at a time. It used the University's network to the internet via JANET (Joint Academic NETwork), which only connected to a sample of other Universities, and was never connected to the entire internet. It was shut down in February 1991 out of fears that the "JANET police", i.e. representatives of the Joint Academic NETwork might have found out about the talker and "Cat" might be prosecuted for stealing bandwidth and misusing the university's computer systems.

After it was closed, Daniel "Cheeseplant" Stephens, a user of the talker, was inspired to create his own talker, Cheesehouse in honour of Cat Chat, and thus talkers were born.

See also

* talker
* ew-too
* Cheesehouse (talker)

External links

* [http://www.cheeseplant.org/~daniel/pages/cph.html Cheesehouse History, mentioning Cat Chat]
* [http://www.ewtoo.org/tree.txt Neil Robertson's family tree of talkers]
* [http://www.ewtoo.org/history.html Brief History of Ew-too]
* [http://www.omnicron.com/~tea/mud/code/ewtoo.save A history of talkers by M Simms]