---------------------------------------- talk talk June 25th, 2021 ---------------------------------------- I've got a talk daemon running on cosmic.voyage. That's right, the old one-on-one real-time chat program 'talk(1)'. In fact, I've got ytalk(1) installed, which is even better. This morning I was talking about talk and realized I'd never seen an RFC for it. So I went looking... And found nothing. There is no RFC for talk. At all. Others did some searching too and came up with the same result. I _did_ find some forums talking about their own search for and RFC and coming to the same conclusion. As best I can tell, the only way to figure out how it works is to look at the code running the clients and the servers and work backwards. [0] (HTM) [0]Like this So what? Well, in our little corner of internet history it seems like quite an oversight. How did this awesome little tool get missed. It's mentioned by name in the netequette RFC [1] and discussed at length, but there's no implementation rules actually codified anywhere. Wild! (HTM) [1] RFC 1855 It's also a missed opportunity to breath new life into something ancient. With a bit better documentation we could have new talk daemons and clients in a heartbeat. Look at that first link above and ask yourself how long it would take you to code your own today in C or Go or Python or Lua or Perl or Forth or whatever your party language is? We could have sexy clients and robust servers next week. With the recent finger revival discovery of users is super simple again in the tildeverse and other pubnixes. Layer in some good ol' fashioned talk and now we're cooking with gas. And hey, since there's no bloody RFC to hold us back, why not slap some TLS on that bad-boy and make a neotalk that's secure, runs on UDP, has full unicode support, and I dunno... washes your car? Someone out there needs a pet project. How about this challenge: Write up the docs! Seriously! As the first step to help EVERYONE else, take a tour of search engine results, the links up above, and put together a mini RFC-like doc on implementation. Share it around and lets see how many new talk developments we can get this summer. The summer of talk! (HTM) Talk Talk!