Many LAN Messengers offer basics functionality for sending private messages, file transfer, chatrooms and graphical smileys.
At the time, computers were usually shared between multiple users, who accessed them through serial or telephone lines.
Novell NetWare featured a trivial person-to-person chat program for DOS, which used the [IPX/SPX] protocol suite.
WinPopup uses SMB/NetBIOS protocol and was intended to receive and send short text messages.
On Apple's Mac OS X-based computers, the iChat program has allowed LAN messaging over the Bonjour protocol since 2005.