In 1973 there was already a system capable of making groups of people communicate in real time, sharing the screen and watching the words of others appear letter after letter. It was called Talkomatic, and it was a primordial instant messaging system designed in a very particular context: not in the garage of a nascent startup in Silicon Valley, as you may already be thinking, but in a university laboratory dedicated to teaching. If you have ever wondered where group chats, thematic rooms, the feeling of “being present” despite being far away come from, you absolutely must know the history of Talkomatic.
Talkomatic, the first instant messaging system: birth and decline
Talkomatic was born in 1973 at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Developed by two programmers, Doug Brown and David Woolley, to be honest the project didn’t start entirely from scratch. The two young developers were in fact working on a system called PLATO, an acronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operationsone of the first computer-based e-learning environments in the world. PLATO was much more than just a teaching aid: it was a true social ecosystem, which already in the 1970s included email, discussion forums, private messages and multiplayer gaming experiments. At a time when most computers operated via punch cards and delayed responses, PLATO instead allowed immediate interaction between networked users.
In this context Brown built the first chat prototype capable of connecting multiple people at the same time. Woolley enhanced it by adding features such as the ability to create separate rooms and rudimentary privacy management. What distinguished Talkomatic from later tools was its split-screen interface: each participant “occupied” a visible portion of the space, and when they began typing, the others saw each letter appear in real time. It was therefore not a question of waiting to press the Send button once the message was completed, as happens in most modern chats, but of directly witnessing the process of writing each message.
Watching the words emerge gradually, with hesitations and corrections, gave the chat participants a feeling of “presence” that today we connect more easily to voice or video. In the late 1970s it became one of the most popular elements of the entire PLATO system, remaining active until the mid-1980s.
Despite its influence, Talkomatic did not become the dominant model of messaging in later years. In 1980, in fact, CompuServe introduced the CB Simulator service, while in 1988 IRC arrived, theInternet Relay Chatwhich made the idea of thematic channels on the Internet common. These systems favored a more efficient approach from the point of view of network resources, but sacrificed the “letter by letter” immediacy typical of Talkomatic. The subsequent spread of graphical interfaces in the 1990s gave rise to messaging clients such as PowWow, ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger.
The return of Talkomatic
In all of this Talkomatic seemed to be dead and buried. In September 2013, however, developers Brown and Woolley resumed development of Talkomatic, and on March 11, 2014, for the first time in several decades, there was a new chat about the new version of Talkomatic, based on modern Web standards, in particular WebSocket, a standard (dating back to 2011) that allows continuous two-way communication between browsers and servers. In the following years the service continued to evolve: in May 2014 version 2.0 of the service introduced the private rooms function and in July 2015.
In March 2024, however, the historical version of the service was deactivated and only a few months later, in June 2024, Talkomatic was relaunched as an open source project on Talkomatic.co, thanks to the work of Mohd Mahmodi and with the support of those who consider this chat a cultural heritage of digital history. Today anyone can enter it and directly experience what it was like to communicate when the Internet did not yet exist in the form we know.
