The "what were you thinking" version of Gush. Wes and I recently spoke at the Northeastern chapter of the ACM about developing Gush. We managed to find and show the original version of Gush that we demo'ed at the very first JabberCon in Colorado nearly 3 years ago. Wesley managed to sneak into this picture, but of course was left out of the description (Wes is the guy on the very right).

Every time we pull up this version of Gush, we have to hold our heads in shame. However, it's worth noting that Wes was slugging away with Flash 5 at that stage. I was also at the early stages of my Python programming career. The worst part of the whole thing is that we created a custom, ad-hoc protocol for messaging between the Python service and the Flash front-end.

Below is the login screen. No SSL, no SASL, no proxy support, and no inline registration.

Here's a message window. Looks pretty, doesn't it? Well, you couldn't resize it. Heck couldn't resize any of it. We kind of glossed over that detail at the time.

Wes and I had this great idea that the away message for a person would be on the "back" of the window. So, if you click on the window, it would flip the textarea over and you'd see your away message and the other person's away message.


In many ways, that version of Gush was similar to our 1989 Corolla that barely made it up to Keystone, CO where the conference was held.