A Chat Application on a Bare Internet

Chat applications are available on many computer platforms. We present a novel chat application on a bare Internet using bare PCs. In a bare Internet, which is overlaid on and coexists with the Internet, all computing devices are bare, meaning they have no operating system and no persistent storage. We describe the design and implementation of the chat application and use it to conduct preliminary tests on the Internet. The results show the feasibility of a bare Internet. Our contributions include a simple chat design, a closed system approach, a bare Internet architecture, context-based user authentication, security by design, server-controlled chat sessions, and extensibility to other application domains. This work lays a foundation to build other domain-specific applications on a bare Internet.