[Dioxide2119]

So I'm pretty (very?) young compared to most HN luminaries. I've never even started a company much less did something HN famous like writing the LGPL. But I love to hear these discussions.

I'd love to ask the elders this: when did you first start doing group chats, as in multi-user chat rooms with roughly permanent de-anonymized identities?

So, I was in jabber IM rooms in my first job, we didn't use cell phones, but there was an IT department chat, a companywide chat, etc.

Later technologies include lync/skype4biz, hipchat, teams, slack, and zoom.

Limiting myself more to the article's definition (mobile-first group chats), I'd say it was Google Hangouts, GroupMe, WhatsApp, then Signal, now its Signal + discord + FB messenger + all the millions of apps that just should be parts of libpurple / beeper.

But for those of you who remember eternal september, when did the group chat as those dot com babies like me know it first start out?

[ff317]

Personally (as someone who was high-school aged in the early 90s):

1. FidoNet BBSes were one early pre-Internet form ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet ). Even once the early Internet was up and running for some, some of us lived in countries/places where there was no access, and so the loosely-interconnected FidoNet BBS system was the first form of online group communications I was exposed to. There were even some gateways passing email and usenet newsgroups between FidoNet and the Internet towards the end. I had several local friends, we all ran FidoNet nodes, and we did use it for interpersonal communications at times.

2. Usenet - I used this a little bit in the mid-90s for true communication, but mostly that was highly technical in nature, e.g. IETF discussions on protocol development issues, etc. Also lots of using it to download binaries of course, but that's not really chat. I mostly didn't "know" the people I was interacting with, other than by online reputation.

3. IRC - From around 1994 onwards for me (when I finally had real access to the real Internet), on the EFNet IRC network (and a couple others, to a lesser degree). I spent many hours of every day lurking on EFNet's "#hack" channel and several others. There was a real sense of an online-first community, and then there were smaller and often private channels of people you knew from your real life (the other local hackers in your immediate community, or people you met at conferences, etc). I won't defend the culture as necessarily stellar, especially by today's standards, but at the same time, there was a sort of sense of community where it didn't seem to matter much who or what you were in real life, a sort of "if you're here, you're one of us" vibe. I think at least around 1994-1997-ish, IRC was pretty central to my social life (not all of it of course, but still!). Some of it was more anonymous in nature, but a lot of it was people I had met in real life or were even local friends of mine.

[secabeen]

My wife met one of her first boyfriends on the Religions discussion chat on AOL. IRC dates back to 1988.

I met some people on both Compuserve and Prodigy, although I'm no longer in contact with any of them.

Still friends with some people from the WWIV BBS days in SoCal.

[rkagerer]

CompuServe, before there was much of an internet. Friends to this day with someone I met on there.