Goofey was an early instant messaging program for UNIX systems, written in the mid-1990s by Tim MacKenzie and Darren Platt. At the time it was seen as an improvement over the UNIX talk and mail programs and was popular with computer science students studying at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where it originated. A version of Goofey for Microsoft Windows was written by three first year Monash University Computer Science students and released in 1996. The underlying server pluto was originally developed under SunOS and supported thousands of users efficiently with a lightweight non-threaded design. A number of bot clients were developed for Goofey such as Donald, a calendaring client written by Kevin Lentin, and ET, a phone directory application. Mickey, a console ASCII clock and message taking application was the original inspiration for the project to allow CS honours students to easily leave message for one another. The network chat feature was a natural outgrowth to allow more efficient message delivery. The Mickey features were eventually separated from the core server to allow cleaner separation of components.
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