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###IRC- (no idea what the first words were and definitely not funny)
Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a multi-user chat system, where people talk on "channels" in groups, or privately, was born in the summer of 1988 When a Finnish engineering student by the name of Jarkko Oikarinen sat down to improve the BBS (Bulletin Board System) in use at the University of Oulu, Finland.
IRC was intended to be a real time BBS, but in the end Oikarinen decided that there were too many features in the BBS, so he threw out that portion, leaving only the real-time chat that we have today.
The results were spread to some of Oikarinen's friends and eventually the internet at large, but IRC remained largely in the academic realm (by 1998 there were some 40 servers worldwide) until history stepped in to give it a kick in the pants.
Depending on who you ask it was either the attempted Soviet Coup of 1991 or the first Gulf war that brought IRC more mainstream attention. During both events IRC was used to circumvent media blackouts and stream up-to-the-minute news out of the region to the world at large.
###ListServ (got the who, when and where, but again, no funny)
Listserv was developed to allow bulk messages to be sent on the BITNET network. In the early days if you wanted to be added to a mailing list you sent a message to INFO@BITNIC. Contrary to automated Listserv of today, back then, INFO@BITNIC was a person who manually added your address to the mailing list in question.
As the number of messages increased it often took weeks or even months to get your e-mail address added to a mailing list.
Recognizing that this was sub-optimal, Eric Thomas decided to improve the software and in 1986 released Revised Listserv, which not only automated a number of process, it decentralized the the process in favor of a distributed model which shared the network load between several machines.
Although it started as a personal project to speed up his own workflow, the impending doom of the IBM mainframe on which revised Listserv ran forced Thomas to found L-Soft to raise the money need to port ListServ over to Unix and other platforms.
Eventually L-Soft released version of ListServ for nearly every mainstream OS.
###IM (cluster fuck really, very hard to tell when it started or who created it) -
IM in limited form dates from around 1965 when Tom Van Vleck and others wrote a program for the Multics shell, which included, among other features, a user interface that allowed users to send messages to other logged in users.
By the 1970s the most popular messaging program was called "talk." To say talk was primitive would be something of an understatement -- in early versions, talk did not separate text from each user, meaning that if users typed simultaneously, characters from each user were intermingled in the display.
When talk arrived on Unix, it was vastly improved and eventually partially supplanted by ytalk which allowed conversations between more than two users.
Up until the advent of ICQ and AOL instant messenger in the mid 1990s, IM remained primarily a terminal-based experience. But ICQ, and then later AOL, sparked the GUI trend and the rest as they say, is history.
Of course history in this case is still something of a jumbled mess, there are some 20 protocols for IM, nearly all are proprietary and most can't interact with each other. It's also worth noting that "instant messenger" is a trademark of AOL.
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