Winpopup (2001)

Kinda related old guy story time: My high school had a small room full of 286es running Novell, which was dated even for its time. I was a self-taught nerd who took intro-to-programming classes to goose my GPA easily (it didn't help, I dropped out anyway, but that's a whole other story). Anyway, I had been exposed to early IRC and BITNet Relay and decided I could clone it easily by just appending a chat log to an ever-growing file on the Novell network, and the 'clients' would just periodically check this file for growth and print the new bytes. Once one important bug was fixed (you couldn't check the file too often or you'd melt the Novell server), the chat program was permanently installed as a plague upon the high-school programming classes. Novell had its own popup messaging in text mode, but they'd already locked it down due to student shenanigans, but this was a group chat that could be made to work wherever there was a world-readable Novell share, and iirc the network wouldn't function properly without at least one (the 'mail' directories? idk it's been awhile).

Gosh I was so proud. I never directly caused any computer problems in high school, but damn if they didn't try to find a way to blame me for every foul wind that blew. They deserved my little group-chat annoyance.

Ahh, the memories. Abusing "net send" in WinNT 4.0 in my first workplace was our daily pastime (all other chat apps were forbidden).

Just looking at these screenshots makes me wish computers were still so (relatively) simple. I’m no Windows fan, but it’s so soothingly retro.

Are there some shenanigans here with the publication date?

The screenshots looked surprisingly large and high-quality for something published in 2001. I looked up the page in the Internet Archive, and there's no record of its publication before today:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://susam.ne...

I even got a call from a person who received one of the popups over the internet. Because the message had my name on it. I just happened to have a common name in Finland, and the receiver dug up my phone number and called. Of course, it was not me who sent the popup, but it was pretty amusing to explain that indeed it was not me, and I gave instructions on how to disable the 'feature' completely.

Unix Talk [1] in terminal only class in university, because telnet talkers were already too much..

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

In other words, "net send".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Messenger_service

Gotta love "net send".

I just recently watched an old episode of The Screensavers from 2002 where Kevin Rose talked about potential spam abuse of computers connected to the internet with the service enabled.

If you got some nostalgia from this Winpopup post, it's definitely worth watching! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNUhIy78Ro

Ah the memories. I wrote my own net send receiver (eg. a winpopup without the sending capabilities) back in the days: https://www.splitbrain.org/projects/popupmessage

IIRC it was used briefly in the hospital I worked at as a way to send messages to specific workstations.

In the early days of ADSL in the Netherlands all PC's got a public IP when they connected. Winpopup was a lot of fun those days...

ahhh, IT lessons at school. That was our local chat tool.

Holy crap, workgroups. I remember those. Opening up other kids' shared folders in college and finding pirated software, someone's collection of MTM files they composed... porn...