Cat Chat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
[edit] History
Cat Chat was created by Chris Cat Thompson, who was a university student at Warwick University 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.
