[ih] Larry Roberts & RD the first electronic mail manager software [was written in TECO on TENEX]

[Jack Haverty]

Just a few years ago, I stumbled across an Annual Report that MIT 
submitted for one year's work in the early 70s.  Since I was there at 
the time, I was curious how history recorded what we were doing then.  
Looking at the section for our group, I found a description of a 
revolutionary implementation of a teleconferencing system that allowed 
people to interact in real time using the ARPANET which had been 
completed that year.

I didn't remember that we had built any teleconferencing system. Of 
course with age comes memory loss.  But I remember lots of stuff we did 
then, but not a "teleconferencing system".   A sign of encroaching 
dementia...?

With further investigation...

A bunch of us at MIT in Licklider's group spent a lot of hours getting 
multi-player MazeWar running on our fancy new Imlac minicomputers.  
Someone added a feature where players could trash-talk each other with a 
shared screen space trying to lure them into an ambush or gloat on 
another kill.   MazeWars of course had nothing to do with whatever 
research we were doing.   Gettings MazeWar going was just a lot of fun.
We all thought MazeWars was just a cool hack and extremely addictive 
game.   If curious, see 
https://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze-war/index.html

But the experience did reveal, to me at least, the importance of 
latency, and the difficulties of getting a bunch of computers to 
interact over a network.   Imlacs had no I/O except RS232.  So, our 
"LAN" was a star-shaped configuration with Imlac minicomputers connected 
via RS232 to our PDP-10 as the center of the star (7 floors away), and I 
had goosed the RS232 hardware well beyond its spec to achieve almost 100 
kb/sec.  I tried to convince BBN to upgrade the TIP hardware to support 
higher speed "terminals", but was rebuffed -- "The TIP supports 
terminals up to the maximum reasonable speed of 9600 bits/second."

MIT's Annual Report touted Maze as a "teleconferencing system".

Jack