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Instant Messaging: Past, Present and Future

8 March 2013 - 11:22am — Talat Chaudhri

A brief history...

Instant messaging has been around on the Internet for longer than the World Wide Web. In its earliest, purest (and, it's probably fair to say, crudest) form, it was possible to use the Unix command line tool write to output a message to another user's terminal, provided that they had previously typed mesg y (i.e. messaging yes), or indeed to directly echo or even cat the contents of a file to another terminal.

The business of unique identification

23 February 2012 - 11:58pm — Talat Chaudhri

What need is there for unique identifiers?

Put in relatively non-technical language, there is an increasing concern in information science in general to uniquely identify different things, organisations or people that could otherwise be confused, whether on the Internet or in the physical world. In technical terms, these are all referred to as resources (even if people might find it vaguely demeaning in normal language to be considered as such).