By 1984, TALK grew under Jenks’ ingenius design, swelling to 30 to 40 users signed in on a constant basis.
"We were planning outings to go places, see where our friends were going, should we go to Chuck E. Cheese and raid it as a big group?" Jenks recalled. "At the height of its popularity, it was more social networking than anything--we were doing then what Twitter is doing now."
Of course, as TALK membership ballooned with members across not only Milwaukee, but even across the globe in London, Germany and other destinations exotic to the average high school student, the problems grew without regard to language or location.
TALK worked by allowing users to write text to a file, which was then watched by other users to change. "If too many people sent messages to fast, you would miss messages," Jenks said.
Reading through an 8000 page computer manual strewn across an 8-foot-long banquet table one night, Jenks finally discovered a means to command the software to keep the file open all the time, streamlining the chat process and making it easier to use.
Jenks saved the day again. For a short time, anyway.
The End of the TALK Era
After two years of excessive use as TALK became more popular, the disk crashed several times, sending the future of the program into question.
The school district administrator would not allow TALK to continue to run as the program was written, Jenks said, so the district administrator wrote his own version called NEWTALK, which allowed messages to be broadcast rather than writing files directly. "A few years went by, and then NEWTALK came around, and eventually, it just disappeared," Jenks said. "To this day, whether the administrator pulled TALK because of its burdensome size and popularity or it just died off naturally, I don’t remember exactly what happened."
Despite NEWTALK's disappearance, all was not lost. The vestiges of TALK soon showed up in successors to Jenks' design.
BBS chats and IRC appeared shortly after the demise of TALK, most reincarnations featuring similar features and operations as Jenks’ original design.
Meanwhile, Jenks continued to foster his love of computers through the mid ‘90s, helping bring companies into the Internet age.
He credits one of his original TALK users as being instramental in using his high school calling card as a means of landing his first job out of high school building computers. (Unfortunately, the market wasn’t ready for household PC use.)
He then went on to help bridge the gap between a U.S. company and counterparts in Russia, helping set up email services and getting the company up and running on the World Wide Web.
Today, he is the networking administrator for IOD Incorporated, an information management corporation in Green Bay, Wis.
But, tomorrow, Jenks’ story could be worth more than a footnote as historians piece together the history of the Internet age.
Growing evidence suggests many similarities between his TALK design and its technological successors, but, Jenks will tell you he probably thinks we would have ended up where we are anyway.
As we prepared to end our interview, Jenks still worked to brush off all the talk of pioneering and founding fathership; TALK was, after all, not created to change the world, but something he thought would be fun to do.
But, even a little bit of pride never hurt anyone.
“We were on the cutting edge of things, though, weren’t we?"
