Internet Citizen's Band

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Internet Citizen's Band (better known as ICB ) means one of the first Internet - chat programs. It was first published in the spring of 1989.

history

The first version of ICB consisted of a program called "Forumnet" or "fn" and was written by Sean Carrick Casey, an employee of the University of Kentucky . It was widely used at various universities, including a. from the University of Kentucky, Georgia Tech , MIT , University of New Mexico , Stanford University , Mills College , UC Santa Cruz , and UC Berkeley . Fn, which was based on MUD software written by Casey , made both the protocol and the client software known.

After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, Fn was used as a real-time means of communication because the Internet connection in the hard-hit Santa Cruz was available again faster than the telephone network. The University of Kentucky shut down the servers for Forumnet in March 1991 for various reasons. Within two months, however, the Fn user John Atwood Devries managed to reverse engineer the client to program a server and make it accessible to the community . He called this, his version, International CB or ICB for short. These servers, which apart from the client software had nothing in common with the original Forumnet server, formed the basis for many other ICB servers. The source code of the server was completely revised between 1995 and 2000 by Jon Luini and Michel Hoche-Mong to improve the stability and functionality of the server. The server can still be obtained from the ICB website (last version 1.2b from 2000).

The ICB network still exists thanks to its dedicated user community.

Clients are available for all major operating systems, including UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Macintosh. Furthermore, clients were implemented in the following programming languages, among others: C , C ++ , Perl , Java and Emacs Lisp .

Functions

ICB masters many functions that are now standard in chat programs, for example chat rooms, private messages and the registration of your own nickname. Most clients also support Tcl scripts.

Restrictions

Due to the lack of multi-server shared groups support, the number of users was always limited, in contrast to more popular chat programs.

ICB does not support file transfer or multimedia features.

credentials

  1. ^ History of ICB , accessed November 2, 2007

Web links