And iChat's use of the speech bubbles for IM dates back to 1997:

http://jens.mooseyard.com/2008/03/the-origin-of-the-ichat-ui...

A very novel UI at the time.. here is a cached version of the broken pic: http://6.media.tumblr.com/MitMvSO0c6w81bbgrsKunjNE_500.png

Microsoft Comic Chat, first released 13 August 1996, even crazier UI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

First demo January 1996: http://kurlander.net/DJ/Videos/ComicChatVideo.shtml

wtf. that's just awesome. why aren't everyone using that?

Even funnier, the military used it in the Iraq war to communicate.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/battlefield_pr.html

"We'll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes."

Because (a) IRC is relatively dead (b) it sent a bunch of funny formatting codes which are a mess to read if you're not using Comic Chat too and everyone else was annoyed with that (c) it's kind of hard to find a copy these days.

But it was a fun little client back in the day.

Sorry, I was referring to iMessage.