Zephyr (protocol)

Created at MIT as part of Project Athena,^[1] Zephyr was designed as an instant messaging protocol and application-suite with a heavy Unix 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 were the first widely used IP-based instant-messaging systems.

^ Jennifer G. Steiner; Daniel E. Geer, Jr. (21 July 1988). "Network Services in the Athena Environment". Proceedings of the Winter 1988 Usenix Conference. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.31.8727.

[Athena_Network_Services-1] Jennifer G. Steiner; Daniel E. Geer, Jr. (21 July 1988). "Network Services in the Athena Environment". Proceedings of the Winter 1988 Usenix Conference. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.31.8727.

[1]