Talk
- This article is about the Unix program; for spoken communication, see Speech.
- The title of this article is incorrect because of technical limitations. The correct title is talk.
talk is a program used for live text communication between users on multiuser computers running the Unix operating system. talk eventually accommodated conversations between users on different machines. Follow-ons to talk included ntalk and ytalk. ytalk was the first to allow conversations between more than two users. All of these programs split the interface into different sections for each participant. The interfaces did not convey the order in which statements typed by different participants would be reassembled into a log of the conversation. Also, all three programs transmitted each character as it was typed, lending a more immediate feel to the discussion than recent instant messaging clients or irc. Users more familiar with other forms of instant text communication would sometimes find themselves in embarrassing situations by typing something and deciding to withdraw the statement, unaware that the other user(s) had seen it all happen in real time.
A popular program called "flash", which send malformed information via the talk protocol, was frequently used by pranksters to corrupt the terminal output of the unlucky target in the early 1990s. It did this by including terminal commands in the field normally designated for providing the name of the person making the request. When the victim would receive the talk request, the name of the person sending the request would be displayed on their screen. This would cause the terminal commands to execute, rendering the person's display unreadable until they reset it. Later versions of talk blocked "flash" attempts and alerted the user that one had taken place.
See also
- Talk Magazine