Interesting Evolutions in Technologies – Chat, FTP, Telnet
I've been involved with computers since before the days of widespread Chat, ftp and telnet. It was initially modems with teletypes or (if you were lucky) a glass tty (terminal). There was nothing to download to - save the box you were logged into, and then it was pretty much your entire world. If you wanted to look at another system you hung up and dialed it. Period. It was all we had, and in relation to what came before (keycards and terminal rooms) it was heaven on earth. But things changed.
Ethernet changed a lot, we got networks of machines in college - not yet PCs, and the old hobby machines of the 70's didn't have ethernet cards in them. If you wanted to have them talk to one another you did a special serial cable with Tx/Rx crossed and then you were good to go. But by the time you had widespread adoption of ethernet, you had networks, and when you had networks it didn't take long to have telnet, ftp and chat.
I can remember first using ftp to get at things across the globe while in grad school. There were newsgroups that might publish the site and directory of something useful, and then with anonymous ftp, you could go get it. It wasn't fast, and there were no Google-like search engines in place... you had to log in, search the directory tree for the file you were looking for... download it and hope it made it down before you lost your connection. Still, this was big computer to big computer, it wasn't until the PCs came out that you really saw the growth of the Kermits, XModem, YModem, ZModem file transfer protocols. FTP was almost forgotten.
But IRC Chat staged a massive growth, and telnet was the way to get from one machine to another. So not everything was forgotten. But fast-forward to today. It's amazing to me to see that ftp, chat, and telnet (ssh) are as strong now as they were in the early days - not because something better hasn't come along, but because the work put into the documentation way back then.
Look at the RFC for FTP or Telnet someday... it's amazing the detail they went into. I've implemented both, and was immediately impressed that the RFC was right on point with the intended audience - people wanting to understand and implement the protocol. The docs are very well written, complete and detailed, but not overly verbose and wordy. These things were written by people wanting to pass on this knowledge to others in the industry and make sure that there were no lingering questions and problems.
FTP is, to this day, a great way to get files around, and is in every web browser around. Telnet (SSH) is virtually unchanged - save for the additional security, but is just as useful. It's Chat that seems to have taken on almost mythical proportions.
Look at all the Twittes, IMs, IRC Chat clients. It's all the same, basic premise - I type and you see it, you type and I see it. They first version I used was even called type on the Unix BSD4.x systems at Purdue. But look how many ways you can now communicate through this little concept. You've got the store-n-forward of SMS or Twitter... you've got the IRC Chat and a ton of different IMs. It's as if this - communication between people - was the real killer app of the network. Sharing a computer meant files and resources of one were available to another. Putting the machines on different desks took that away - only to be brought back by the network.
I use Chat (Colloquy), IM (Adium), and Twitter (Twitterrific) all day every day. It's fun to think about where things started and how they have evolved over the years. I'm sure the video chat will be bigger when the bandwidth is there, but right now, it's just not. Give it time, though, and it'll be just like all the Sci-Fi movies you've seen. It's a great time to be alive.