Oldest / first online poker room ?

I have two questions, anyone here who knows what is ...

1) the first online poker room

2) the oldest poker room today ?

I assume that the first doesn´t exist anymore.

I have heard that in the beginning there was some sort of text based poker room without any graphics , which Chris "Jesus" Ferguson used ?!?

according to wikipedia its planet poker in 1998 !

Yes,

Planet Poker was the first site you could play for real money on. The site Ferguson played on was an early play money site.

planet poker still there also
have start date 1997

Yeah its planet poker but it not the same as it use be at the time, i dont think allows U.S players?

Some friends told me that Party / Empire or PokerRoom (now closed) were the first ones...

In his history of poker, Cowboys Full, James McManus notes that in 1989 Ferguson and a couple of "geek friends" came across a site called IRCPoker.net which was apparently developped at Berkeley. The site featured "the first computer program capable of dealing, keeping track of bets, and awarding the pot to the best hand."

McManus doesn't say whether the site was text based.

I do know that in the early 1990's CF and a fairly sizable number of poker notables were members a usenet group called rec.gambling and they played a sort of verbal poker sometimes. This was a part of the freenet system which was in place before the dot com explosion. A friend of mine was a member of this group.

iirc it took quite a while to play a hand on IRC. You had to wait for someone to be on to take their action. Unless you stay on IRC, it could take a while.