Learning network programming has been on my backburner for quite a while now, so I decided that it was about time I got around to it.
Way back when I made a program called NetChat that was written in, of all things, a language called Blitz Basic, which was a language focused on making games. NetChat was what my friends and I used at school to chat with each other between classrooms (instead of paying attention in class…) It was single threaded and used Blitz Basic’s implementation of networking to communicate. Nonetheless it had support for multiple concurrent users, colors for users and their messages, an admin user, and even the ability for all users to draw on a picture at the same time using colored circles of various sizes.
Unfortunately the source code and program has been lost for years now, which is disappointing because it was probably the most full featured, and definitely most used, program I had made around that time. Since then I’ve been wanting to recreate it in a more common language. This post is about the first steps toward making it, simply figuring out how to send and receive pieces of data through the network.