For many of us, the internet chat room is a key part of the online experience. Chat rooms enable us to communicate with people all over the world in real time. They’re usually dedicated to specific interests or topics, and once you join one, you can see all the messages that other people post as they’re posted.
Chat rooms are a popular feature of websites. They’re a big hit in the gaming world, with many multiplayer video games using them to enable players to communicate with one another. Those who play at a casino online might have come across chat rooms for live dealer games and multiplayer bingo games. These enhance the gaming experience by making the game more social and giving it a community feel.
The Very First Internet Chat Room
Chat rooms are commonplace these days. Many websites have them so that visitors have a space where they can interact with one another and, in turn, engage with the host site more. They’re an important part of the internet thanks to their ability to enable communication. Their history stretches back several decades, with the very first chat room launching in the 70s.
1973 saw the launch of Talkomatic, which was the world’s first public chat room. David Woolley and Doug Brown, two computer programmers from the USA, developed the software. They used the PLATO system at the University of Illinois, which was created in 1960 and was designed with teaching in mind. The name PLATO is an acronym for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations.
Talkomatic was capable of supporting chat among multiple people, though it was very limited compared to today’s standards. When it started being used, it only had six rooms in total and each of these could host no more than five people. This meant the entire system was restricted to just 30 people at a time.
Modern chat room systems, by contrast, can support countless rooms with large numbers of people allowed in each one. To give an example, each WhatsApp chat can hold a maximum of 1,024 people.
Talkomatic was a success and a version of it, known as Term-talk, was integrated into the PLATO system. With Term-talk, PLATO users could press a specific button and start a chat with another user. It wasn’t a full multi-user chat room like the original Talkomatic, though it was a convenient feature nonetheless.
Developments in the 80s
In February 1980, CompuServe launched the CB Simulator, which was the first chat room available to the wider public. Users could join rooms, take part in live chats and create screen names for themselves. It was essentially an early version of a standard public chat room.
Then in 1988, the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was developed. Unlike most other internet communication systems, the IRC is still in use today, though it’s nowhere near as popular as it used to be. It uses a client-server networking model, which means that clients (those using the chat feature) connect to a central server to access resources, i.e. the chat room and its functions.
The 90s and the Launch of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist, invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN. He wanted there to be a reliable and convenient way of sharing information with others around the world. In 1993, the World Wide Web was made available to the public.
Throughout the rest of the 90s, the World Wide Web continued to attract users and saw its popularity skyrocket. As the number of websites grew, so did the number of chat rooms. At first, they were fairly basic in terms of their features and how many users they could accommodate. Technology progressed and both chat rooms and the World Wide Web itself became more advanced, introducing new front-end and back-end features.
Some of the most popular chat rooms in the 90s were developed by MSN Messenger and AOL. Though both of them shut down some years ago as a result of more modern chat services becoming the preferred option, they enjoyed many years of success.
Further Changes in the 00s and Beyond
The 00s were all about smartphones becoming mainstream. People still used chat rooms on desktop computers and laptops, and these continued to receive updates. However, mobile chat rooms became the go-to option for many people. Developers designed chat rooms to run effortlessly on touchscreen devices. They incorporated features such as media sharing and video calls to give users of chat rooms even more ways to interact and handle information.
Other changes introduced by some of the major chat rooms include linking accounts to phone numbers, read receipts that let you know when a message has been read and end-to-end encryption. Streaming platforms such as YouTube, Twitch and Facebook Live create chat rooms when broadcasting live content. This enables people to watch the broadcast and interact with other viewers at the same time.
Some of the main chat service providers, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage and Facebook Messenger, have hundreds of millions of regular users. The chat rooms they provide, whether open to the public or limited to a small selection of people, continue to offer users a way to seamlessly communicate with one another online.
Today, it’s easy to overlook the chat room as just another feature of websites and apps. Like other aspects of the internet, it’s come a long way and is considerably more sophisticated than the original chat rooms.
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