BITNET Relay
Bitnet Relay Chant or Relay was a precursor to todays Inter Relay Chat and various instant messaging programs developed by Jeff Kell, JEFF@UTCVM. It was mostly used in the late 1980's and early 1990's.
Before Relay you could send a message to someone on another computer if you knew their userid (like a screen name or login) and the name of the computer system.
To use Relay you would send a message to a userid called Relay. This Relay userid was an interface to the Relay program. This message could contain a command for Relay or a message for a real person at some other computer system.
You could join a "channel" which was like a chat room or send private messages.
The time it took for a message to get to recipient varied. Most of the time messages within the United State didn't take more than a few seconds. Sometimes messages could take 30 minutes or even hours.
As a strategy to deal with long lag times users would talk to many people at once in a round robbin fashion as replies were returned.
Few schools allowed undergraduates access to Bitnet and Relay. Two that did were Kansas State University and Gallaudet University.
(This page is dedicated to the memory of dawndawn@ksuvm)