Internet Citizen's Band is an early Internet chat

Online chat

Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...

 program. It was released in 1989.

History

The first version of ICB was a program called "Forumnet" or "fn", written by University of Kentucky

University of Kentucky

The University of Kentucky, also known as UK, is a public co-educational university and is one of the state's two land-grant universities, located in Lexington, Kentucky...

 IT staffer Sean Carrick Casey. It was widely used at the University of Kentucky

University of Kentucky

The University of Kentucky, also known as UK, is a public co-educational university and is one of the state's two land-grant universities, located in Lexington, Kentucky...

, Georgia Tech

Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States...

, MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, University of New Mexico

University of New Mexico

The University of New Mexico at Albuquerque is a public research university located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States. It is the state's flagship research institution...

, Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, Mills College

Mills College

Mills College is an independent liberal arts women's college founded in 1852 that offers bachelor's degrees to women and graduate degrees and certificates to women and men. Located in Oakland, California, Mills was the first women's college west of the Rockies. The institution was initially founded...

, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley. Fn, based on a MUD

MUD

A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...

 software program by Casey, established the protocol and clients.

Fn was used as a realtime communications channel after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

Loma Prieta earthquake

The Loma Prieta earthquake, also known as the Quake of '89 and the World Series Earthquake, was a major earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area of California on October 17, 1989, at 5:04 p.m. local time...

 - Internet access from hard-hit Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, California

Santa Cruz is the county seat and largest city of Santa Cruz County, California in the US. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, Santa Cruz had a total population of 59,946...

 returned to service before reliable phone service did. In March 1991 the University of Kentucky changed policy and shut down the fn server. Within 2 months a new server had been created from the client software by another fn user, John Atwood Devries, and was put online now renamed ICB. This new server code, unrelated to the original server except by the common client software source, was then used as the basis of many ICB servers to follow. From 1995 to 2000 the server code was heavily rewritten for stability and additional features by Jon Luini and Michel Hoche-Mong and remains available at the ICB.net web site.

ICB is still in operation with a dedicated user base.

Clients are available for UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Macintosh, and have been written in C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

, Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, and Emacs

Emacs

Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...

 among others.

Features

ICB features many standard chat program functions, including channels, private messages, and nickname registration. The common clients support TCL

TCL

TCL or Tcl may mean:* Biochemistry** TCL * Companies** TCL Corporation, a Chinese electronics company** Twin City Lines, former public transit via streetcar in Minneapolis*Computer languages...

scripting of commands and functions.

Limitations

ICB has never supported multi-server shared groups, so the number of simultaneous users has always been somewhat limited in comparison to more popular chat programs.

ICB does not support transferring files or multimedia via the chat program.

External links

• ICB home page, including links to client and server software
• cicb at Sourceforge, the most common client
• [ftp://ftp.icb.net/pub/icb/src/icbd/Protocol.html ICB protocol description]