“AOL wins instant messaging case“, cried BBC News last night. Basically, AOL has been granted a patent on instant messaging systems, which covers “anything resembling a network that lets multiple instant messaging (IM) users see when other people are present and then communicate with them” …

Hmmm, I was doing this on a Linux box at university in 1995, where I’d login, do a ‘finger‘ or ‘w‘ to see who was logged on, and how long they’d been idle, and then I’d use ‘talk', a program which allows you to see in a split screen, what you’ve typed to that person, and what they’ve typed to you (or latterly ‘ytalk‘, which allows more than two people to type to each other simultaneously), to chat away to that person. They could have been in the same lab, on the same floor, in a different building on campus, or in some cases, not even in the same city or country.

At a pinch, I could even chat to people logged into the same machine as me with the ‘write‘ command, where you directly write text to that persons terminal or shell, but only if they have set a flag permitting anyone to do so (the ‘mesg y‘ or ‘mesg n‘ setting).

My point is, AIM has only existed since 1997. A variety of Un*x platforms have allowed people to perform similar functions since the 60s and 70s.

Also note that the BBC News article mentions that ICQ, the pioneer of the current influx of instant messaging clients, has “fallen off the map in terms of usage, largely due to the fact it does not have the distribution power of Microsoft and Yahoo”, convienently omitting the fact that AOL now own Mirabilis, the company behind ICQ. Funny that, eh?