Introducing the Mercury program

Back in 2009, in my days as a software developer, I was working at a company that didn’t utilize an internal messaging system. Phones weren’t smart enough yet (the iPhone was introduced only in 2007, and Android came a year later in 2008), but messaging clients on desktop PCs were abundant.

However, they all required a central server to be configured in order to manage the messaging network. In the consumer world, this was achieved by the company that owns the messaging service maintaining the central servers; however, this would require logging in to these services at work with our personal credentials and friending everyone at work. The other option was to host the servers within the company and use open source or public messaging systems like Trillian. This wasn’t something that I had access to do, nor was it something the company was willing to supply, so I thought about the idea of a distributed, or peer-to-peer (P2P)...