vco  

vco was a visual conferencing environment. It worked with several online conferencing systems (like today's IRC), first with Delphi, but later with GEnie and The WELL. It represented users as icons, and also spoke what they typed using Macintalk.

The original version of vco had a single conference table around which all the participants gathered. A follow-on version, known as vco+, allowed for multiple rooms with different backgrounds. The following two screenshots are from vco+:

The original vco required users to create their online face icons using the Macintosh resource editor, saving them into a "face file" for each user, which were exchanged prior to the online session. vco+ added a face editor, which allowed people without resource editing skills to create faces:

The vco+ version was developed together with Mitch Waite (The Waite Group) and Anthony Bay.

Here is a disk image for a demo version of vco, which you can use this with vMac, a Mac+ emulator, or any other program capable of running the early versions of the Macintosh OS.

For the curious, the source code for vco can be found here.