| You can find Anthony and others
from the show on Paltalk. Try
Paltalk Plus now for Free. |
I first started using Paltalk around 2000 when the company purchased an audio program I had been helping beta test called firetalk. Before Paltalk I had tried many other programs and I will be droning on and on about this shortly!!!!
update.... I managed to come across several items from when Paltalk was first coming to be I plan posting them soom (yeah, I know you are all so excited).
But as for the video chat history.... some folks seem to think it is a 'new' thing - far from it - it has been around for 14-15 years.
CUSEEME: I remember being told about a program developed at Cornell University called CuSeeMe back in the early 90's, it sounded interesting but was mainly a Mac thing. Around 1996 my boss showed me the PC version of CuSeeMe and I was hooked. At that point you could not do audio, it was choppy, pixelated video and chat, but it still blew "IRC" out of the water in my opinion. Over the next few years several other video chat programs poppped up, I have an old page I created in 1997 for a CuSeeMe 'reflector' I ran called "Yikes" - you can see my links page (originally on geocities) here: yIke's CuSeeMe and Paltalk links/info page. CuSeeMe was very much a niche program but the people that used it loved it (and unlike Paltalk it had many programs you could use it on such as Windows (even Windows 3.1), Mac, Linux, Amiga, and OS2. For the techy folks it also worked a bit differently - people would run their own "Reflectors" and you would enter an address to connect to them, on each reflector might be one room or several, usually there would be maybe 10-15 people in any room but near the end of my use of CU I saw some rooms with 100 people in it at one. There was (and is) a free Cu Server program that out there and there are even a few di-hards that use the program to keep in touch.
IVISIT: Another video chat program that has been around since around 1997 - it was actually created by one of the folks from Cornell that helped develop CuSeeMe. I had assumed it was gone but looks like the site is still up and running. You might want to try it out - the big plus for this program is that there IS a Mac client. Ivisit homepage. Like CUSEEME you can run your own server or use IVISITS servers. I tried it a long time ago (2003 or earlier) and I haven't tried it since so I can't say if it is any good.
ISPQ ("I Speak"): Never tried it - again another program that has been around for a long time (1999) - I think it works like Paltalk in that you log into their servers and can visit different rooms. Free 21 day trial from their site.
ICUII: Again I believe someone from the original CUSEEME team developed this software - their history lists them as being around since 1996 so that could be true. Homepage Here.
And I still haven't gotten to the Paltalk history but I will tell you this much - all of these programs were around before Paltalk.