Warning, this is a bit rambling… I was just remembering some of the things I’ve encountered over the years and as they pop into my head in random order I tried to organize it a little bit. As I was doing research I came across this Wikipedia entry, but haven’t checked it so as to not pollute my memory Timeline of file sharing - Wikipedia.
There is an entire history of ways to communicate online. Someone should write a book to be honest. I’ve used many over the years… but I wanted to bring up IRC because you mentioned chat. These days Slack is a layer on top of IRC as far as I understand.
Email started it all, which led to Usenet. The Usenet Oracle use to be a really fun “toy”. It had its very own culture where the Oracle was very sarcastic and mean, but in the funniest ways possible. The way it worked is you would email a question for the Oracle to answer (usually existential type questions, but anything as a fun jumping off point would do) and then your cost for an answer was to assume the identity of the Oracle for a session and answer someone else’s question to the Oracle.
Then IRC happened in the late 80’s, and ICQ and the other IM clients in the 90’s. The Internet was kind of stuck in universities in the beginning, and everyone else was using BBSes outside of that. Dial up Internet started to become a thing in the mid 90’s, and Windows 95 was probably how a lot of people got online. There was winsock in Windows 3.11 (for Workgroups) but Windows 95 really made dial up Internet adoption take off.
In the IRC time frame there was a file sharing protocol called FSP. It was like FTP but over UDP. It was popular with file sharers on campus until the IT people got wind and mostly blocked it. In the 2000’s I remember WASTE and other peer to peer chat and file sharing taking off briefly… but then the whole MP3 revolution started, which in my memory started with Windows 98, and AudioGrabber, but I am sure there were other things around besides what introduced me. Then there was Napster and all those other ones that came after, WinMX being the one I most remember. List of P2P protocols - Wikipedia
Then BitTorrent hit the scene, and is still here with us today in some form or fashion. Let’s not forget Mega and that legal battle that still isn’t settled yet. Then of course there are all the file hosts that cropped up and many of them have died away.
It seems like a trend that things develop and then develop a following, and then age out and die down… and the idea comes around again in some new form while the old one is still out there somewhere plugging on in obscurity. As humans we seem destined to want to connect and to forget our past connections and start something “new” over and over again.