powwow

I’m not sure why, but I recently reminded myself of an IM app called PowWow. Looking back, I’ve come to realize that it was way ahead of its time. I was first introduced to PowWow back in 1994. Vianet was the first popular ISP in Timmins. I clearly remember in the summer of ’94, Sean Claire and myself drove in his beat-up Nissan pick-up truck to Vianet‘s office on Algonquin Boulevard before our work shift at the Hollinger Golf Course and signed up for dial-up Internet accounts. At that time, when you signed up for Internet access with Vianet, they gave you a floppy diskette that contained some automated connection setup as well as Windows 3.1 versions of Trumpet Winsock, Netscape Navigator, Eudora Email Lite, WinPopUp and a beta version of some app called PowWow.

PowWow was awesome. You could have buddy lists, send offline messages, chat with multiple people at the same time, transmit preloaded sounds (laughing, hand-clapping, etc), VoIP with a mic (similar to Skype and Gizmo nowadays), transfer files and more. It even had a text-to-speech component. It had all of the standard functionality of today’s IM clients and then some. With PowWow, you first had to log onto a PowWow server. Vianet had a such a server. Actually, they had nodes for each of their major hubs at the time (Timmins, Sudbury, North Bay and the Soo). On Vianet‘s website, they had listings of all people logged into PowWow so you could find someone random to chat with. Of course, with your buddy list, you could also just talk to PowWow buddies that you wanted to or other users around the world. By the time I was off to university, I discovered ICQ and I manually launched PowWow only when I needed to, which wasn’t all that often anymore. I can’t remember everyone from my PowWow buddy list but I do remember having Chico, Sean Claire and a girl from Timmins named Tamara (I can’t remember her last name but Chico might) on it. I recall showing my mom how I could talk to Chico using its VoIP features on a 28.8 KBps dial-up connection. She was quick to point out that I could do the same by simply calling him on the phone, since I was already tying up the line anyway. Good point but I still thought it was slick, from a geek’s point of view. I also remember using PowWow to coordinate Doom/Doom 2 and RoTT fragfests with Sean when I’d get home from the golf course after 10PM. Good times.

The only decent info I could find about PowWow now is in a Wikipedia article. You can view it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_%28chat_program%29

Reading this article taught me a few things that I didn’t know about PowWow back then. For starters, I wasn’t aware that the founder of McAfee also founded PowWow. Also, I actually believed the whole “Tribal Voice” mystique in that it was developed by Native Americans. I was such a n00b back then 😮