Bitnet Relay Chat
From Free net encyclopedia
Bitnet Relay Chat or Relay was a precursor to today's Internet Relay Chat and various instant messaging programs. It was developed by Jeff Kell, JEFF@UTCVM (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga) in the early to mid 1980's in REXX.
Before Relay was implemented, one could send a message to someone on another computer if one knew the other person's userid (i.e., screen name or login) and the name of the remote computer system the person was logged into.
To use Relay, one would send a message to a userid called "Relay." This Relay userid was an interface to the Relay program. The message could contain either a command for Relay or a message for a real person at some other computer system.
One could also join a "channel," which was like a chat room, or send private messages.
The time it took for a message to get to a recipient varied. Most of the time messages within the United States didn't take more than a few seconds. Sometimes, however, messages could take many minutes or even hours to arrive.
As a strategy to deal with long lag times, users would talk to many people at once in a round-robin fashion as replies were returned.
It was used mostly in the late 1980s when Valdis Kletnieks at Virginia Tech released a pascal version from scratch that consumed far less CPU time and early 1990s when Smart Relay appeared which allowed more impressive handling of message delivery.
Kell himself once predicted the demise of BITNET Relay Chat, his prophecy proved true for reasons far different then the onces he himself gave. TCP/IP and the advent of the internet spelled the end of BITNET entirely and unix did not have a similar socket mechanism. However the Relay Chat itself was somewhat closely replicated by Jarkko Oikarinen's Internet Relay Chat