Since slow teleprinter keyboards were used at the time (11 characters per second maximum[citation needed]), users often could not wait for each other to finish.

It was common etiquette for a long typing user to stop when intermingling occurred to see the listener's interrupting response.

More modern versions use curses to break the terminal into multiple zones for each user, thus avoiding intermingling text.

Users more familiar with other forms of instant text communication would sometimes find themselves in embarrassing situations by typing something and deciding to withdraw the statement, unaware that other participants of the conversation had seen every keystroke happen in real time.

[7] A popular program called "flash", which sent malformed information via the talk protocol, was frequently used by pranksters to corrupt the terminal output of the unlucky target in the early 1990s.