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       talk talk
       June 25th, 2021
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       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!