About Talkomatic
Back to LobbyHistory of Talkomatic
Talkomatic was made by Doug Brown and David Woolley in 1973 (before the internet) making it one of the first online chatting systems ever made!
Talkomatic was developed at the PLATO System at the University of Illinois, it allowed real time typing communication in between users.
Each person had their own little section of the screen based on how many people were in the room. It remained until the mid 1980s until they decided to shut it down.
2014 Web Version
In 2014, March 11th, Brown and Woolley released a web version of Talkomatic, exactly 41 years after the original came out. This version completely remade the character by character system they had.
Later in 2015 they added Facebook login integration, but in January of 2018, Steve Zoppi helped revive the service — and during this time, Ray Ozzie donated 3 domain names (talkomatic.com, talkomatic.org, and talkomatic.net) to support the effort. By 2018 the service was across many domains, alongside Brown and Woolley's original talko.cc.
2024 Shutdown and Open Source Revival
The original web implementation became unavailable on March 14th 2024 due to a spike in user activity, thanks to Xander (who goes by the name of yikes on YouTube) who uploaded videos in an attempt to revive the platform. The person running the server (Steve Zoppi) was forced to shut it down.
In June of 2024, a software developer Mohd Mahmodi released Talkomatic Classic, an open source re-implementation and revival of the system. The site's source code was published on GitHub under the MIT License, allowing people to contribute to the project.
This Version/Revival
This version was made by Testy (AKA Test Account). It introduces new features and the original decoration that open.talkomatic.co had. It currently runs on a custom Node.js + Socket.IO server with extra features, like room persistence across restarts, a built in fishing bot, and a Talkomatic Modern recreation.
