Often times Alexander “Sandy” Trevor is credited for creating the first ever online chat room. Alexander was an executive at the once popular online service CompuServe. He created their very first chat system known as the CB simulator. CompuServe was started in 1969 with the primary mission to provide computer processing services to the Golden United Insurance Company. Eventually CompuServe went on to build a complex network across the United States to serve dialup customers who would connect to their services using a modem attached to a standard phone line.
Later on in the mid 1980s a new chat technology began to emerge called internet relay chat, also known as IRC. The power of the internet began to be deployed across the country allowing people to connect to IRC chat servers from around the world. IRC isn’t a centralized service like CompuServe was; rather it’s a protocol that can be used by anyone who wants to run their own chat service. Major IRC networks are formed by connecting multiple IRC servers together, creating a real time chat environment for everyone connected.
IRC was famously used to report on the Soviet coup detat attempt in 1991 despite a widespread media blackout. It has also been used in the same way to report on other major world events such as the Gulf War. You can still find logs to this day of these historic events, making IRC a great way to capture history as it happens. This has led IRC to be the standard among text based chat services.
Through the 1990s as technology advanced further, new forms of chat began to spring up such as instant messaging and video conferencing. Instant messaging was mainly used to relay real time text messages back and forth before the advent of SMS. Video conferencing became popular as faster internet services began to roll out around the US. The rest, as they say, is history.