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Talkers are chat sites that people use to talk to each other over the internet. A talker is a '' MUD '' variant, a Communication System precursor to MMORPG s and other Virtual World s such as Second Life . Talkers pre-date Instant Messaging , and are a form of online Virtual World s in which multiple User s are connected at the same time to Chat in real-time. People log into the talkers remotely (usually via Telnet ), and have a basic text Interface with which to communicate with each other. The early talkers were essentially MUDs, with most of the complex game machinery stripped away, leaving just the communication level commands - hence the name "talker". Most talkers are free and based on Open Source software. Many of the online Metaphor s used on talkers, such as "rooms" and "residency", were established by these early pioneering services and remain in use by modern 3D interfaces such as Second Life . HISTORY OF TALKERS Intranet talkers The first talkers were hosted on an Intranet within a school or office or local Bulletin Board System s that people used to connect to the Internet. An early example of an intranet talker was UNaXcess , which was created in 1984. Early Internet talkers Early Internet talkers were primarily hosted on a University Server without the permission of the university, and hence when the university found out about them they were shut down. Most of the first users of these talkers were from the same university or else from a nearby university. From 1994 , a lot of talkers were hosted on privately owned servers, and were owned or hosted often by the System Administrator , manager or sometimes owner of the school or company. The first talker that was hosted on the Internet was created in 1991 by Chris ''Cat'' Thompson, and was called Cat Chat , which was based on LPMud , a type of MUD code. Later that year, Daniel ''Cheeseplant'' Stephens created the code for Cheeseplant's House , which was the first ever popular talker, and hence 1991 is regarded as the "true" beginning of the history of talkers. NUTS talkers In 1992, a major alternative to ew-too code was being developed by Neil Robertson as part of a school project on the history of talkers, and he based the code on UNaXcess , an early talker from 1984. His project was called ''"TalkServ"'', but later released it publicly as NUTS , or Neil's Unix Talk Server. He created the code in 1993, and made his code able to be freely downloaded immediately, thus making a proliferation of NUTS talkers, which eventually became the preferred code base for talkers. Talker hosting In 1996, talker.com was formed, the first ever server to sell space for talkers, later giving it the name Dragonroost . The server had up to 90+ talkers on it at one time, during the mid-nineties boom of talkers. A number of other hosts started up as alternative hosting companies to talker.com. With the proliferation of these hosting places, everyone could have their own private talker. As such, the number of talkers grew exponentially, whilst the number of users did not. This was no more obvious than with Fantasia's Multiple Worlds which grew to 30 worlds by 1998, with at times less than 5 users combined on the 30 worlds. Privacy Talkers are designed and intended to be places on the Internet where free conversation and discussion can take place. The high comfort level users often develop, combined with the lack of security in Telnet (namely that of text being sent in the clear, or without encryption), leads to some concern that there are insufficient safeguards in place against snooping. Many talkers, especially NUTS-based ones, have an .invisible command that allows admins to be invisible to normal users. The intention of this command is to allow admins to monitor talkers while not having to be available for administration requests. Some people considered this invisible ability as a form of "spying". As a preventative measure against backlashes and spying ploys, the license for Popular Codebase PG+ includes a caveat which reads: LEVELS OF USERS Most talkers have three basic levels - USER, the default level, WIZ, the administrator level, and GOD (or SU), the owner level. Some talkers required users to register before promoting you to USER, and had lower levels for punishment purposes. Some also had higher levels of users for long-term users or users who had been voted on to a user council (such as Crystal Palace ). A handful of places had several different levels of wizard as well. COMMANDS AND ABILITIES Each talker had different commands available, but a typical list is as follows:
The use of these commands made for an appearance which is similar to how Instant Messaging programs like MSN Messenger work today. TALKER CODE BASES There are a number of code bases available for public download. These include:
OTHER MUD VARIANTS ''Main article: MUD#Variations_on_MUDs '' There are many other types of MUD s that are sometimes referred to as "talkers". The most common of these are: MUSH A MUSH is A Multi-User Shared Habitat, Holodeck, or Hallucination, a text-based online social medium to which multiple users are connected at the same time. MUSHes are often used for online social intercourse and role-playing games. MUX A MUX is a variant of MUSH. MUX originally stood for "MUSH X-Men" (the author of TinyMUX was enhancing the code for his own X-Men -based game), but these days it stands for Multi-User eXperience. MUXes are largely indistinguishable from MUSHes, except from the point of view of a coder. MOO MOO is short for MUD object oriented and is a type of MUD text-based virtual reality system. MOOs can be programmed using the MOO programming language. MUCK A MUCK is a MUD that allows its players to create the online environment as well as playing in it. MUCKs can be programmed using the MUF programming language. EXAMPLES OF TALKERS
SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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