A LAN Messenger is an

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...

program for computers designed for use within a single

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

(LAN). Many LAN Messengers offer basics functionality for sending private messages,

file transfer File transfer is the transmission of a computer file through a communication channel from one computer system to another. Typically, file transfer is mediated by a communications protocol. In the history of computing, numerous file transfer protocol ...

chatroom The term chat room, or chatroom (and sometimes group chat; abbreviated as GC), is primarily used to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology, ranging from ...

s and graphical

smiley A smiley, sometimes referred to as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram that represents a smiling face. Since the 1950s it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram, or as a form of communication, such a ...

s. The advantage of using a simple LAN messenger over a normal instant messenger is that no active Internet connection or central server is required, and only people inside the firewall will have access to the system.

History

A precursor of LAN Messengers is the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

talk command, and similar facilities on earlier systems, which enabled multiple users on one host system to directly talk with each other. At the time, computers were usually shared between multiple users, who accessed them through serial or telephone lines.

Novell NetWare NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The original NetWare product in ...

featured a trivial person-to-person chat program for DOS, which used the PX/SPXprotocol suite. NetWare for Windows also included broadcast and targeted messages similar to WinPopup and the Windows Messenger service. On

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

, WinPopup was a small utility included with Windows 3.11. WinPopup uses SMB/

NetBIOS NetBIOS () is an acronym for Network Basic Input/Output System. It provides services related to the session layer of the OSI model allowing applications on separate computers to communicate over a local area network. As strictly an API, Ne ...

protocol and was intended to receive and send short text messages. Windows NT/2000/XP improves upon this with Windows Messenger service, a Windows service compatible to WinPopup. On systems where this service is running, the received messages "pop up" as simple message boxes. Any software compatible with WinPopup, like the console utility NET SEND, can send such messages. However, due to security concerns, by default, the messenger service is off in Windows XP SP2 and blocked by Windows XP's firewall. On Apple's -based computers, the iChat program has allowed LAN messaging over the Bonjour protocol since 2005. The multi-protocol messenger Pidgin has support for the Bonjour protocol, including on Windows.

References

Internet culture Online chat {{network-software-stub

History

See also

References