Editing Chat room (section)

== History ==

{{Mcn|date=March 2022}}
[[File:Colloquy.png|thumb|upright=1.3|A conversation on IRC]]
The first chat system was used by the U.S. government in 1971. It was developed by Murray Turoff, a young PhD graduate from Berkeley,<ref>{{cite web |last1=Subramanian |first1=Ramesh |title=CSDL {{!}} IEEE Computer Society |url=https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2012/01/man2012010092/13rRUwhpBHR |website=www.computer.org}}</ref> and its first use was during President Nixon's wage-price freeze under Project Delphi. The system was called EMISARI and would allow 10 regional offices to link together in a real-time online chat known as the party line. It was in use up until 1986.  The first public online chat system was called [[Talkomatic]], created by Doug Brown and David R. Woolley in 1973 on the [[PLATO System]] at the [[University of Illinois]]. It offered several channels, each of which could accommodate up to five people, with messages appearing on all users' screens character-by-character as they were typed. Talkomatic was very popular among PLATO users into the mid-1980s. In 2014 Brown and Woolley released a web-based version of Talkomatic.

The first<ref>"CompuServe Innovator Resigns After 25 Years", ''[[The Columbus Dispatch]]'', 11 May 1996, p. 2F</ref> dedicated online chat service that was widely available to the public was the CompuServe [[CB Simulator]] in 1980,<ref>"Wired and Inspired", ''The Columbus Dispatch'' (Business page), by Mike Pramik, 12 November 2000</ref> created by [[CompuServe]] executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor in [[Columbus, Ohio]]. Chat rooms gained mainstream popularity with [[AOL]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.tribtoday.com/news/local-news/2020/04/this-week-in-history-man-caught-on-tracks-is-killed/|title=This Week in History: Man caught on tracks is killed}}</ref>

[[Jarkko Oikarinen]] created [[Internet Relay Chat]] (IRC) in 1988.  Many peer-to-peer clients have chat rooms, e.g. Ares Galaxy, [[eMule]], [[Filetopia]], [[Retroshare]], [[Vuze]], [[WASTE]], [[WinMX]], etc. Many popular social media platforms are now used as chat rooms, such as [[WhatsApp]], [[Facebook]], [[Twitter]], [[Discord]], [[Snapchat]], [[Instagram]], [[TikTok]], and many more.