Created at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

as part of

Project Athena Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. , At ...

, Zephyr was designed as 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 ...

protocol and application-suite with a heavy

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, and ot ...

background. Using the "do one thing, do it well" philosophy of Unix, it was made up of several separate programs working together to make a complete messaging system. Zephyr and

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and ...

were the first widely used IP-based instant-messaging systems.

Creation

Zephyr is the invention of Ciarán Anthony DellaFera who was, at that time, an employee of

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

and a Visiting Research Scientist at

. The design originated as a solution to the "reverse Remote Procedure Call (RPC)" problem: how can service providers (servers in a client–server system) locate and communicate with service users. The initial concept emerged from conversations between Ciarán and Michael R. Gretzinger, another systems engineer at

, in early 1986. By mid to late 1986 Ciarán had distilled the problem to two specific issues: the ability to locate users in a distributed computing environment (known today as "presence detection"), and the ability to deliver scalable, light-weight, and authentic messages in a distributed computing environment. The Zephyr Development Team (Mark W. Eichin, Robert S. French, David C. Jedlinsky, John T. Kohl, William E. Sommerfeld) was responsible for the creation of the initial code-base and the subsequent releases that were issued throughout the late 1980s.

Application

Zephyr is still in use today at a few university environments such as Carnegie Mellon,

Iowa State Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the n ...

, University of Maryland, College Park,

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

and MIT. It has been largely replaced by modern and more popular instant messenger systems such as XMPP. MIT currently operates both Zephyr and XMPP.

Points of interest

Zephyr uses UDP datagrams sent between ports 2102, 2103, and 2104. It is incompatible with most routers doing

NAT Nat or NAT may refer to: Computing * Network address translation (NAT), in computer networking Organizations * National Actors Theatre, New York City, U.S. * National AIDS trust, a British charity * National Archives of Thailand * National As ...

because it reports the internal IP address and so returning datagrams are incorrectly routed. Most sites have deployed Zephyr using Kerberos 4 authentication exclusively, though in late 2007, some sites, including Iowa State, deployed Zephyr using

Kerberos 5 Kerberos () is a computer-network authentication protocol that works on the basis of ''tickets'' to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. Its designers aimed it primarily a ...

Client support

BarnOwl
has always had Zephyr protocol support. *

Pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

supports the Zephyr protocol since version 0.11.0-pre10 (April 13, 2001).http://www.pidgin.im/ChangeLog * Adium added support for Zephyr in Version 0.70 (October 18, 2004), but dropped in version 1.4b6 (June 3, 2009).PreviousVersionHistory2 – Adium Trac
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References

External links

Zephyr 3.0

The 1988 Usenix paper on Zephyr

Zephyr on Athena

MIT Q&A about Zephyr

Zephyr's Source Code
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zephyr (Protocol) Free instant messaging clients Instant messaging protocols Massachusetts Institute of Technology software