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

[Steve Crocker]

Sounds familiar.  Might have been the name BBN used for their system, but
I'm not sure.

On Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 4:35 PM Vint Cerf <vint at google.com> wrote:

> Wasn't there another system called Planet in that early era?
> V
>
> On Tue, Aug 8, 2023, 16:31 Steve Crocker via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> There were multiple conferencing system efforts in those early years.  BBN
>> built one that included video.  I moved to ISI in 1974.  The BBN system
>> was
>> built a bit later; I don't remember the exact date.  I do remember sitting
>> in a swivel chair, spinning it around, and then watching myself complete
>> the swivel, so the latency was definitely noticeable.
>>
>> The Institute for the Future (IFF) developed a conferencing system called
>> Forum.  It was essentially identical to IRC, except it required everyone
>> to
>> be logged into the same machine.  A user's input was considered to be a
>> paragraph.  Even if the user was working at a character-at-a-time
>> terminal,
>> which most of us were, output would be suppressed until the paragraph of
>> input was complete.  At that point, any paragraphs from others that had
>> been queued up were then printed.  If you tried to type new input, you
>> would not see the echoed characters until all the queued up paragraphs had
>> spewed out.
>>
>> This was a remarkably effective and usable system.  I have a vivid memory
>> of using it to interview a candidate to replace Larry Roberts as head of
>> IPTO.  On a Sunday afternoon, six of us participated: The candidate, Larry
>> Roberts, Steve Lukasik, Alex Tachmindji, Bob Kahn, me.  Tachmindji was
>> Lukasik's deputy.  Bob and I were program managers under Larry.  All of us
>> except the candidate were based in the DC area.  Some of us were at home;
>> others were in the office.  The candidate was at home in another part of
>> the country,elsewhere, working in his den.
>>
>> I was the most junior person on the call, so I said little but listened a
>> lot.  Also, Tachmindji had had the least experience with these tools, and
>> I
>> provided some help to him via a side chat.
>>
>> I noticed there were sometimes two or even three distinct threads in
>> progress.  It was not only fairly easy to follow them, it was actually
>> more
>> interesting than if we had all been in the same room.  We didn't have to
>> wait for each person to finish talking, so it seemed more efficient than a
>> regular face to face meeting.
>>
>> I've often wondered why this mode of interaction is used more frequently.
>> I've even tried it out when I had control of the group, but the results
>> weren't great.
>>
>> Larry left DARPA in late 1973 or perhaps very early 1974, so that pins
>> down
>> the date moderately well.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Steve
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 3:56 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> > 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
>> >
>> >
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>> >
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