How to replicate the old unix chat?

[JD Austin]

It sounds a lot like 'talk' on linux ( and most  unixes):

TALK(1)                   BSD General Commands Manual
TALK(1)

NAME
     talk — talk to another user

SYNOPSIS
     talk person [ttyname]

DESCRIPTION
     Talk is a visual communication program which copies lines from your
ter‐
     minal to that of another user.

     Options available:

     person   If you wish to talk to someone on your own machine, then
person
              is just the person's login name.  If you wish to talk to a
user
              on another host, then person is of the form ‘user at host’.

     ttyname  If you wish to talk to a user who is logged in more than once,
              the ttyname argument may be used to indicate the appropriate
              terminal name, where ttyname is of the form ‘ttyXX’ or
‘pts/X’.

     When first called, talk contacts the talk daemon on the other user's
     machine, which sends the message
           Message from TalkDaemon at his_machine...
           talk: connection requested by your_name at your_machine.
           talk: respond with: talk your_name at your_machine

     to that user. At this point, he then replies by typing

           talk  your_name at your_machine

     It doesn't matter from which machine the recipient replies, as long as
     his login name is the same.  Once communication is established, the two
     parties may type simultaneously; their output will appear in separate
     windows.  Typing control-L (^L) will cause the screen to be reprinted.
     The erase, kill line, and word erase characters (normally ^H, ^U, and
^W
     respectively) will behave normally.  To exit, just type the interrupt
     character (normally ^C); talk then moves the cursor to the bottom of
the
     screen and restores the terminal to its previous state.

     As of netkit-ntalk 0.15 talk supports scrollback; use esc-p and esc-n
to
     scroll your window, and ctrl-p and ctrl-n to scroll the other window.
     These keys are now opposite from the way they were in 0.16; while this
     will probably be confusing at first, the rationale is that the key
combi‐
     nations with escape are harder to type and should therefore be used to
     scroll one's own screen, since one needs to do that much less often.

     If you do not want to receive talk requests, you may block them using
the
     mesg(1) command.  By default, talk requests are normally not blocked.
     Certain commands, in particular nroff(1), pine(1), and pr(1), may block
     messages temporarily in order to prevent messy output.

FILES
     /etc/hosts     to find the recipient's machine
     /var/run/utmp  to find the recipient's tty

SEE ALSO
     mail(1), mesg(1), who(1), write(1), talkd(8)

BUGS
     The protocol used to communicate with the talk daemon is braindead.

     Also, the version of talk(1) released with 4.2BSD uses a different and
     even more braindead protocol that is completely incompatible. Some
vendor
     Unixes (particularly those from Sun) have been found to use this old
pro‐
     tocol.

     Old versions of talk may have trouble running on machines with more
than
     one IP address, such as machines with dynamic SLIP or PPP connections.
     This problem is fixed as of netkit-ntalk 0.11, but may affect people
you
     are trying to communicate with.

HISTORY
     The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD.

Linux NetKit (0.17)            November 24, 1999           Linux NetKit
(0.17)


On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 08:45, <joe at actionline.com> wrote:

> Also, somewhat related, there was an ability to 'echo' a short message
>


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