There's some modern internet based flummy where you do type in real time though, I think. I seem to remember watching letters crawl slowly across the screen and wanting to finish what they were trying to say already so they could just hurry up and get it out. That was in the post-BBS era, but I have no idea what it was. I've looked at a number of IM type things and IRC long enough to say "ewwwwwwwwwww" and go back to email.
I just don't get IM at all, really. People can send email in nearly real time, and there's no expectation that the person on the other end is going to sit there twiddling his thumbs while you get around to saying something that way.
They used to make good hardware. Their newer hardware is pretty crappy.
Their OS really is crappy. It's not even a war anymore. I can't help it that so many people either want to or are forced to run that bucket of crap. I'm just glad I don't have to fool with it very often.
I was over at my boss's daughter's house trying to fix her DSL. I was trying to do everything by the book for the tech support drone because I couldn't get it working without calling to find out what her password and stuff was supposed to be (that I asked her to please write down someplace safe the last time I had to do this.) After the copy of XP Pro that I had just installed about six months ago--which hadn't been used much ,at all since I put Linux on there for her--horked up for the fourth time in a row, I had to tell the drone "Look, I know this is going to scare you, but I HAVE to switch over to a real operating system. This piece of crap is driving me nuts." After I booted the Linux install it only took five minutes to get everything humming. Problem was Windows trying to be friendly and giving me cached versions of status pages from the modem because the internet connection was broken, and it assumed everything on the other end of an IP address had to be on the internet.
Or something. I could have figured it out, but I just didn't have the patience to continue screwing with it. Part of that is familiarity, and a large measure of it is pure crappiness.
Anyway, that whole experience was kind of funny. The tech drone at one point said something to the effect of "I'm glad you know what you're doing, because you lost me six pages ago." I really ought to figure out a way to do this kind of crap for a living. Problem is they don't actually want to hire someone who knows anything about this stuff to help people. They just want a drone to read a stack of FAQs.