Internet Citizen's Band

Internet Citizen's Band (better known as ICB) is an early internet chat program. It was first released in the spring of 1989. [http://www.icb.net/history.html History of ICB] , accessed November 2, 2007]

History

The first version of ICB was a program called "Forumnet" or "fn", written by University of Kentucky IT staffer Sean Casey. It was widely used at the University of Kentucky, Georgia Tech, MIT, University of New Mexico, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley. fn, based on a MUD software program by Casey, established the protocol and clients.

Fn was used as a realtime communications channel after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake - internet access from hard-hit Santa Cruz returned to service before reliable phone service did. In March 1991 the University of Kentucky changed policy and shut down the fn server. Within 2 months a new server had been created from the client software by another fn user, John Atwood Devries, and was put online now renamed ICB. This new server code, unrelated to the original server except by the common client software source, was then used as the basis of many ICB servers to follow.

Clients are available for UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Macintosh, and have been written in C, C++, Perl, Java, and Emacs among others.

Features

ICB features many standard chat program functions, including channels, private messages, nickname registration. The common clients support TCL scripting of commands and functions.

Limitations

ICB has never supported multi-server shared groups, so the number of simultaneous users has always been somewhat limited in comparison to more popular chat programs.

ICB does not support transferring files or multimedia via the chat program.

References

External links

* [http://www.icb.net/ ICB home page] , including links to client and server software
* [http://cicb.sourceforge.net/README cicb] at Sourceforge, the most common client
* [ftp://ftp.icb.net/pub/icb/src/icbd/Protocol.html] , ICB protocol description