Lucid Chat – In Memoriam

In honor of its 10th year, I finally decided to officially retire the original LucidChat.com site. Lucid Chat hasn’t been actively developed since 2000, and I figured it was time to focus on other projects. Although the site is still up (and probably will be for some time), I’ve put a memorial page in it’s place. This is in part due to nostalgia’s sake, since this required a tremendous amount of time and effort to bring to life. And, for historical purpose, since Lucid Chat was one of the first web-based chats of its kind when I launched it in ’97.
Lucid Chat was the original reason why I started my first company Star Computing Solutions in early 1997 (at the tender age of 21). I eventually branched out into other areas (network consulting, software development, and web hosting). However, this proved to be a great business experience and showed me what was involved in starting and running your own company.
Here’s an excerpt from the about page:

“Lucid Chat was one of the original web-based chat products in the mid-late ’90s (Web 1.0). Many of the early web-based chat rooms were very rudimentary, and either used META refreshes (remember “screen flashing”?) to update and display user’s comments, Java applets, or Netscape plugins.
What made Lucid Chat unique at that time was the ability to provide real-time text streaming through a web browser using a simple CGI interface. Many of the techniques used were the precursor to what is now referred to as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). ”
AND
“For a period of time, Lucid Chat was sold and used on dozens of websites (a couple famous bands, record labels, movie sites, and large businesses). It was also featured in numerous reviews of chat products(most famously, ServerWatch) and compared against some of the most popular products of the day (iChat, ParaChat, ConferenceRoom, etc).”

I included commentary on the history, quotes, images, and credits.