SUPERCHATTER (1992)

SuperChatter is a splitscreen chatting program on steroids for Bulletin Board
Systems. I developed it for my BBS as a convenient way of chatting to users.
Since my BBS was one of my main methods of communications partly due to my
hearing impairment, I put a lot of work into this program!

It contained a several state-of-art features that were not found in other
splitscreen chat programs in its own day:

Each user's text zone was completely scrollable and editable. Imagine
SuperChatter as being a splitscreen editor, with each user having their own
text area to play around with. Users could even backscroll in their chat
buffer and modify their old text, even while the other people watched! No
other BBS chat programs had this feature at the time.
Supports ANSI-BBS, VT102, AVATAR, and AVATAR/0+. I even had automatic
detection for this, which was done by playing a short stream of hidden code
sequences, and checking the resulting cursor position. (Which determined what
terminal standard that the user was using). Unfortunately, this advanced
feature revealed some bugs in some communications software programs!

Very efficient progressive text display engine, with the ability to
prioritize the display of various parts of the screen. At the time
SuperChatter was written, 2400 baud modems were common and they often took
10 seconds to transmit a full screen's worth of text. The progressive text
display engine recycles as much of the user's existing screen text as
possible by eliminating transmission of redundant data. Also, if one user
started typing while screen updates were still being transmitted, it would
temporarily pause the screen updates (even during the middle of a line) and
immediately display the user's typing in his splitscreen, before resuming the
low-priority screen update. No other known splitscreen chat programs at the
time were as efficient as SuperChatter in displaying text at optimal speeds
over a 2400 baud modem. This progressive text display engine is not very
unlike certain advanced terminal-display libraries that are now available for
Linux (Such as 'Slang' and 'ncurses').

