CB Radios to Online Chatting: A Brief History

We usually poke fun at the few remaining, non-semi-truck drivers who persist in owning and using a CB radio. Few realize, though, that CB radio, or citizens’ band radio, is the great-grandfather to synchronous conferencing, also knows as online chatting. In 1980, CompuServe executive Alexander Trevor unveiled to the public the CompuServe CB Simulator. CompuServe, the first major commercial online service provider for the United States, created the program with the then popular CB radio in mind; the program had forty “channels,” based on the number of channels used by CB radio, as well as CB radio’s controls such as “squelch,” “tune” and “monitor.” The CB Simulator laid the foundation of today’s online chatting in many important ways, particularly in its use of channels; the forty channels based on CB radio’s would later evolve into chat rooms, thus setting up the schematics for what we know as internet chatting. The CompuServe’s CB Simulator gained a great deal of popularity, even being used to host the first online multimedia conference in 1995 with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones; as of 1995, CompuServe had over three million members making it the then largest online service provider.

The popularity of CompuServe and its CB Simulator would wane, though, as the competition of other providers, primarily AOL, would prove to be too great for the company and its chat service. The CB Simulator became defunct, yet the popularity of internet chatting continued to rise. Today, there are a variety of services and venues for internet chatting.

AOL LLC, formerly knows as America Online Inc., launched its chat service primarily to function as a social network, integrating many features that CompuServe’s chat service did not have. One such improvement was the use of proprietary software instead of the terminal program used by CB Simulator. With the proprietary software, AOL provided its subscribers use of a graphical user interface, or GUI, that proved to be more user-friendly than the outdated command lines of past service providers. AOL also further refined the chat room, expanding it into a more diverse and developed communication tool. Users were now able to take advantage of “private rooms,” “conference rooms” and “auditoriums.” The private rooms, usually created by a single user, accommodated up to twenty-three people and were not moderated by AOL. Conference rooms, necessitating permission from AOL to create, held up to forty-eight people and were moderated by AOL. Auditoriums, also created in consent by AOL, comprised of a “stage” and unlimited amount of “rows.” The happenings on stage were viewable by every member of the auditorium chat room, while the separate rows were permitted to converse with one another--up to twenty-seven members of a single row. With these developments in chat rooms and emphasis on users and communication between users, AOL soon became the leader in the internet chatting field with as many as ten million subscribers in 1999.

Today, many different websites offer chatting services such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and the latest entry into the messaging field, Facebook Chat. Even though online chatting has its humble beginnings rooted in low-fi technology, being spurred on by the CB radio craze of the seventies, this venue of communication is apparently not going anywhere--in fact, it grows daily. Chat-on!