Gtalk

Multi-Line teleconferencing software for DOS, OS/2, and UNIX

What is Gtalk?

Gtalk is a multi-line teleconferencing package will full email and message base capabilities. It also has the capability to link multiple systems togeather into one large conference.

When and how was Gtalk started?

Gtalk was started in July of 1992. It was authored by myself (David W. Jeske) and Daniel L. Marks. The first Gtalk system went online on July 27th,1992. Originally it was written for MS-DOS. It had it's own multitasker to allow it to efficiently handle many users online. Over the next five months, Gtalk was under rapid development. In March of 1993, Magnetic Visions, a chat system in the Vancouver B.C, Canada, area, became our first customer for the Gtalk product. Others followed, but as more systems which were less tolorant of downtime and failures inevitable when running under MS-DOS, the nature of Gtalk needed to change.

It was not until March of 1994 that Gtalk spread wings and flew from the clutches of MS-DOS from which it was born. It was ported to OS/2 in under a week. A testimant to both the modular design of Gtalk, and the powerfull threading capabilities of OS/2. Immediately, systems began to adopt the OS/2 version of Gtalk.

Gtalk takes flight once again

In the Summer of '95 Dan and I re-write Gtalk for UNIX. This time everything was rewritten from scratch. The goal was to strike a good balance between integrating native "UNIX" tools (i.e. by using UNIX style mail and news handling) and custom Gtalk functionality. This provides an easy to use system which far surpasses the capabilities of the common UNIX shell script BBS. (or heavily integrated compiled based systems)

Who are the authors of Gtalk?

David Jeske