Instant Messaging's True Heyday

Lately I have been using a program on my computer (or website and/or phone for that matter) that basically allows me to instant message any friend on any type of instant messaging medium available. It's pretty incredible. And while you're checking you're e-mail or logging into your social network these things are built-in to the web experience as well. It wasn't always that easy.

America On-Line had that snazzy little sound. If I could find a freely available sound, I'd put a little flash button here that you could click and a link to an mp3. Baaaa-Riiing! And you had a message. It wasn't as weird as chat rooms and you could "IM" your friends.

Growing up, I didn't have America On-Line so I used Mirabilis ICQ (which was bought out by AOL at some point) and it's notification sound was much more annoying. It was this very high-pitched "Uh-Oh!" that is scraped into my mind as one of the sounds that should only be played for historical purposes. I will not post this sound a flash button, even though it is freely available. I really don't ever want to walk in someone reading my blog and having to listen to that sound. It was really that bad.

But that sound meant that your friend just sent you a message. And it was grand. ICQ also had this "real time" chat where you could directly connect with multiple friends and watch letter-by-letter as each other typed. It was phenomenal! This feature was also something I had only played with called "talk" which I had seen running Slackware Linux that allowed you to do the same thing in those classy large white terminal font letters on that night black screen.  I remember trying to get a bunch of friends to all connect to my computer with similar black boxes so we could chat like that years later, but ICQ had become a giant by then.

And then for some reason, America On-Line opened up their instant messaging service so any internet user could connect to their instant messaging networks and have that same "Baaaa-Riiing" with their friends.  I immediately installed their program and instant messaged a friend of mine and he was excited that I had become a "member" of his network.  And this is how we do some of our communication to this day, at least a decade a go.

All images retreived originally from wikipedia.

The Command Prompt

Ever since I had a computer, I was typing in commands. I travelled from the Commodore64 system to the Microsoft DOS platform and eventually became lost in the user interface of Microsoft Windows. Commands were soley to run games, start Windows, and change directories. When the MS-DOS command prompt came up one could type:

win

and Windows 3 would start up. When changing directories, there would be tons of files that may or may not make sense to children but I knew that if I messed with the right stuff and typed in the right commands, I could master the filesystem.

I recently recorded a song that started out as an ode to free software and filesystems. After the first thirty seconds or so it was more of an experiment with changing the automatic tuning of my vocals, harmonizing with myself and playing around with simple digital instrument sequencing. There is a lot of pop in the mix, but it wouldn't have ever happened without Linux.

mynight.mp3

 mp3 at http://clarksvegas.com/daniel/mynight.mp3 if flash is not available, which I understand.

Windows 95 had come out and many communities were starting to get on the internet. I had a good friend named Andrew that was into video games, amateur radio and building lasers. He got his first computer after we started hanging out and within a year he was running Slackware Linux and had convinced his parents (We were eleven years old) to buy him an additional laptop so he could network them together in his room and share the dial-up internet between the two systems. It was ridiculous! I remember him showing me a lot of commands and interactivity within the shell, but I didn't really grasp what was going on with those small white words on black screens until years later. What a useful thing the command prompt can be. I'm glad I was introduced to it so early on, but I don't know how kids these days feel about typing in commands (unless it is a part of hacking of modifying some cool new electronic device) to their computers, let alone their portable communication device.

Flash audio player from http://wpaudioplayer.com.
Slackware Linux mascot from Wikipedia.