A very long time ago I used telnet talkers. Around the time that ICQ was popular and before MSN Messenger. gerph, who was very well known in the RISC OS scene (and went on to work for RISC OS Ltd working on RISC OS 4), wrote a telnet talker in BASIC called TalkerD to demonstrate his excellent EasySocket library and I adapted TalkerD to be more NUTS-like. This became known