alt Hacker NewsI remember using talk back when first learning Linux in college. I enjoyed the character-by-character aspect of it.
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The default `talk` and talk service were trash, and often there were protocol errors that would cause you to hang forever, vainly waiting for an answer (classic talk used UDP only.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)
Eventually, a few competing offerings sprang up, in the form of `ntalk`, `xtalk` and `ytalk`. These were superior in every way, and sometimes required swapping out the service attached to inetd. Once you did that, it was a fantastic way to chat live and direct on Unix. Way better than the `write` we started with!
Yes, I've wondered many times why there are no modern (human to human) chat interfaces that implements that, rather than sentence by sentence.
Until you wind up chatting with a painfully slow typist. Even worse is when they typo a lot and take the time to fix them on the fly