taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (10/28/86)
This article is from "Kenneth Ng" <hplabs!@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA:1480@NJIT-EIES.MAILNET> and was received on Sun Oct 19 01:30:06 1986 I've read the talk about EIES in mod.comp-soc and would like to make a few corrections. First, EIES DOES talk to the outside world. For that matter, this mail is definite proof that it does. At the moment the only publically available transfer mechanisms are through MAILNET, which is to be discontinued in December. But there are efforts to get EIES to talk to Usenet and BITNET, possibly to be available next year. It is true that EIES has not kept up with other conferencing systems. EIES was designed in the 1970's before there was such as thing as computer conferencing. But there are a few features of EIES that other systems STILL don't have (to the best of my knowledge). An example is active text. Active text is the ability to modify the text at display time with commands buried in the text. With active text I can write a message that will display different messages to different people, or display different messages depending on whether or not I am currently on line. Lastly, sometime late in 1987 start looking for 2 new systems: EIES 2 and TEIES. These are both efforts to bring EIES technology more up to date with other systems. [this is the last message on EIES itself - I'd like to steer the discussion more towards the IMPACT of conferencing systems and public bulletin boards on society, and vice versa. -- Dave]