Zephyr (protocol)
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Created at MIT, as part of Project Athena, 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 is still in use today at a few university environments such as Carnegie Mellon, Iowa State, Stanford University, University of Maryland, College Park, Brown University, North Carolina State University and MIT. It has been largely replaced by modern and more popular instant messenger systems such as AIM and Jabber.
Zephyr uses UDP datagrams sent between ports 2102, 2103, and 2104. It is incompatible with most routers doing NAT because it reports the internal IP address and so returning datagrams are incorrectly routed. It uses Kerberos 4 authentication exclusively, and no-one has invested the effort to convert it to Kerberos 5.
[edit] See also
- Comparison of instant messaging clients
- Gale, the Caltech equivalent of the Zephyr protocol
