What happened to Gale? That was the other IM system I saw that felt like it had the complexity and internal self-consistency of Zephyr and it feels like it just kind of fell of the face of the earth.
I don't think I've heard of Gale, nor can I find it now that you mention the name... Which I guess is consistent with your "fell off the face of the Earth" theory. If you or anyone else can find a link, I'd love to read about it :).
https://web.archive.org/web/20020126184926/http://www.gale.o...
https://web.archive.org/web/20011221165350/http://gale.org/e...
https://web.archive.org/web/20020214082814/http://gale.org/l...
https://web.archive.org/web/20011127185333/http://fugu.gale....
I think it was popular in a Caltech crowd?
I think a zephyrgram was a "puff"?
I think there was a fairly sophisticated tiered location/tag hierarchy that is very very broadly related to topic/stream/reaction emoji.
Some of the contributor have usernames that look very familiar (I think that's the same jtr whose username I've seen elsewhere, for example).