Gadgetory

these days there is a dizzying number of chat and communication apps for your smart phone or tablet I mean it only takes a couple of seconds to open up the App Store or the Play Store and find literally dozens of offerings that all promise to be the best most fun and most intuitive way to do essentially the same thing send messages photos or short videos to your friends or enemies as it were but all of the modern programs we use to stay in touch that are more or less carbon copies of each other are the product of decades of evolution from predecessors that were dramatically different so while email is often considered to predate modern instant messaging by a fair margin they actually didn't first appear all that far apart from each other the modern form of email that uses the familiar at sign was invented back in 1971 on the old ARPANET a US military network that was one of the forerunners of the internet and real time online chat became a reality just two years later in 1973 when the archetypical II retro-sounding taco Matic was created at the University of Illinois although taco Matic only featured six rooms of up to five users each the functionality was similar to modern chat rooms including the IRC system with its large number of channels that appeared a decade and a half later in 1988 and there have been other improvements like typewriters taco Matic punished users for typos because it transmitted individual keystrokes as they were input meaning that all your elite hacker buddies would know instantly if you didn't know how to correctly spell diarrhea fun fact to taco Matic is actually still available as a modern website if you'd like to check out a piece of internet history but online chat quickly outgrew small groups communicating directly and many we're more interested in seeing what larger groups of people were discussing more generally that's we're using a phone modem to next to a bulletin board system or BBS comes in it's pretty much what it sounds like after logging in you could see what other folks posted to a virtual bulletin board and make your own contributions if you wanted to weigh in much like modern web message boards or forums the first BBS was launched in Chicago all the way back in 1978 providing a place for open online discussion well before the rise of the world wide web and they proved to be very versatile in fact people began using BBS's for file sharing as well meaning they became very popular in the early 1990s however during the web's explosive growth soon after the BBS scene was nearly forgotten by the late 90s though it continues to be popular in Taiwan for some reason and speaking of continuing to be popular the venerable Usenet developed at Duke University all the way back in 1980 still has a considerable if not large following to this day Usenet is organized into topical sections called news groups that allow users to post both articles and replies kind of similar to how read it works today except instead of being hosted on one server Usenet is much more distributed with articles and replies pushed out to many different news servers and special Usenet clients required for access this is because use net isn't part of the web like BBS is Usenet later came to be used for file transfers which is the most popular reason people access the network today as actual discussion is much more common on web-based services though many ISPs no longer offer access to Usenet due to concerns about illegal file sharing of course things really changed in the mid-90s with the rise of instant messaging programs for modern graphical operating systems like ICQ and more notably AOL Instant Messenger or aim which took the world by storm with its buddy icons and thanks to user bios replete with in side jokes thanks in no small part to all of those promotional discs that AOL sent out via snail mail aim had plenty of rivals on the Instant Messaging scene but remain very popular until the late 2000s when Gmail became widespread and offered integrated gchat helping to set a trend that saw a myriad of websites and smartphone apps implement instant messaging with everything from business oriented video conferencing software to dating websites like OkCupid getting into the swing of things and with standard internet speeds becoming faster and faster from both cell phone providers and traditional ISPs it didn't take long for picture and video messaging to become common in ion applications with some programs like apples FaceTime for video and snapchat initially pictures but now video as well focusing almost exclusively on it no word yet though on when we'll have support for holographic messaging so you can give your friends a 360 degree view of whatever trendy food you just spent way too much money on for the sole purpose of sending a picture of it to them speaking of sending to them tunnel their VPN allows you to send out your internet traffic and have the websites and services you use not know exactly where it came from there that was quite belabored but we eventually got their title Bayer VPN is easy to use and lets you tunnel through up to 20 different countries letting you browse the Internet and use online services as though you're in a different country they have easy news apps for iOS Android PC and Mac also a Chrome extension you just turn the switch and boom you are tunneled your connection is encrypted and you appear to those web sites as though you are from somewhere else entirely total bear lets you bypass all the annoying details that typically come with using a VPN for personal use no messing around with port configurations or DNS or anything like that and they have a top rated privacy policy so try out tunnel bear for free with five hundred megabytes thrown in for nothing and no credit card required and if you choose to get a year of unlimited data you can say ten percent by going to tunnel bear comm slash Linus linked below so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a comment if you have suggestions for future ones and don't forget to subscribe