{"id":550426,"date":"2006-10-06T07:14:47","date_gmt":"2006-10-06T07:14:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/550426-back-to-the-future.html"},"modified":"2006-10-06T07:14:47","modified_gmt":"2006-10-06T07:14:47","slug":"back-to-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/550426-back-to-the-future.html","title":{"rendered":"Back to the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first applications appeared as early as the 1970s on Control Data\u2019s Plato mainframes and Digital Equipment Corp\u2019s PDP-11 minicomputers. <\/font><\/p>\n

It was rudimentary and required users to enter arcane instructions on a command line. The first graphical IM program, Zephyr, was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. But it took another decade before IM started becoming the mass communications tool it is today. <\/font><\/p>\n

In November 1996, Israeli company Mirabilis introduced ICQ (\u201cI seek you\u201d), a free IM client for Windows computers. In a short time, Mirabilis signed up millions of users and, in June 1998, it was acquired by America Online, the giant US Internet service provider, for about US280m. <\/font><\/p>\n

Since then, the market for IM clients has mushroomed. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all have their own offerings, each with millions of users. Sadly, they\u2019re mostly incompatible with one another \u2014 Google Talk users, for example, can\u2019t send messages to people using MSN Messenger. This has led to the rise of a new generation of IM clients \u2014 Trillian, Gaim and Kopete are some of the more popular ones \u2014 that can communicate with multiple IM services by understanding all their protocols (the \u201clanguages\u201d they use to exchange information with one another). <\/font><\/p>\n

More recently, IM tools have begun to offer a lot more than just text-based chat. Some now provide Internet telephony and video conferencing capabilities as well as integration with Web-based e-mail systems. Google is probably the most advanced in this regard \u2014 it has built IM directly into its Gmail service. <\/font><\/p>\n

IM\u2019s popularity stems from its instantaneousness \u2014 unlike e-mail, communication takes place in near real time. Users can also see when their contacts are online \u2014 they have \u201cpresence\u201d \u2014 making IM a more sociable way of communicating than e-mail. <\/font><\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to suggest, though, that e-mail is under threat. Far from it. E-mail volumes continue to rise \u2014 in part because of ever growing volumes of spam, or unsolicited advertising, but also because e-mail remains a key tool in business. <\/font><\/p>\n

Television didn\u2019t kill radio. The Internet didn\u2019t kill voice telephony. E-mail, which was invented more than 40 years ago, is likely be with us for a long time still.<\/font> <\/p>\n

Discuss this article<\/a> <\/font><\/p>\n

Inet-Bridge<\/font> <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Instant messaging (IM) \u2014 which has taken SA school grounds by storm in recent months, thanks to MXit \u2014 has been around for almost three decades in other forms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-550426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}