Doug Brown

"For money, ECAD tools for chip designers. For love, on biofeedback for voice training and
musical instruments."

t's hard to find who to credit (or blame) for instant messaging. Those blinking chat boxes may have started with the Gen Y set, but they have fully infiltrated the business world.

Doug Brown had a lot to do with this. In the 1970s he worked on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois, Urbana,one of the earliest online communities.

Brown developed a realtime text messaging system that let people "chat" as a group. "Talkmatic" transmitted each character as it was typed. Up to five people could chat and several channels let others watch,but not join,the interaction. Active participants also could block prying eyes. Now, instant messaging has become a corporate phenomenon.

"You start out chatting with close colleagues and as you grow more comfortable with the technology, you expand it and before you know it you're talking with partners, vendors, customers," says Neal Prescott, a Boston-area IT consultant.

Brown himself doesn't like the fact that today's systems have reverted to the more static one-line-at-a-time transmission. "You lose a lot of information when you don't see the characters come out individually,like where your correspondent pauses to think, or gets excited and speeds up," he says.