Patent nonsense
As AOL pursues its patent on instant messaging, people all over the Net are assembling examples of "prior art" -- instant-messaging-like systems that long predated AOL's. Rafe Colburn recalls one from a company he once worked for. Brian Dear writes in to point out that the PLATO system had IM functionality back in 1973.
Hell, I remember when I was a teenager goofing around in 1974 or so with BASIC game programs on a free "high schoolers" account at the NYU Physics Department's minicomputer (I think it was an HP-2000 but memory is dim), we could IM each other from teletype to teletype -- the messages would pop up in the middle of whatever you were doing; god forbid you were trying to get a clean printout of a 1000-line program and some "friend" had just sent you something like "J052.HS: YOU ARE A DUD." The AOL patent seems to depend on the particular issue of being able to check who else is online; well, I'm pretty sure we could do that in 1974, too.
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