Software Communication
Although voice communication had a pretty big head start on software communication, any fool
can see that software (or data-based) communication has made a fast and permanent impact on
our society. We could spend time discussing many avenues, including services such as CompuServe
(Figure 1.3) or community-owned Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), or go down the road of the
???early??? Internet, but the real boom in terms of software communication for both the business
world and personal communication was the ???Dot Com??? boom of the late twentieth century.
Figure 1.3 A Screenshot of the Early CompuServe Service
6 Chapter 1 ??? Unifi ed Communications
While many larger enterprise-type companies had already implemented internal-only
mail solutions, the rest of the business world was pretty much left out in the cold regarding
data communication. As dial-up Internet began to grow in popularity the ???chosen few??? were
allowed modems (or, if you were really high-tech, you may have had a server with a modem
bank) to go out and get e-mail on behalf of their company.
Likewise, instant messaging (IM) had just begun to pop up as a ???cool??? new way to
communicate with friends and family. Although purists would claim that the UNIX operating
system really offered the fi rst IM communication (as many BBSs did), companies such as
Tribal Voice (Pow Wow; Figure 1.4), AOL (AOL Instant Messenger/AIM), and ICQ began
to pop up all over the place. Again, at fi rst IM was really nothing more than a ???gadget??? that
was used in home environments, and it was generally looked down upon in the corporate world.
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