chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (06/24/83)
Here at University of Maryland, we have a program called 'phone' which
will let you talk to up to 8 people simultaneously, with each
conversation in its own window (or, if your terminal does not support
windows, or if you don't like windows, on its own line). This was
originally written by Jim Rees (uw-beaver!jim) to use curses. It's
similar to the VMS phone program. I hacked at it for multiple
conversations, and to use my windows library. It uses the CMU IPC
facility for 4.1BSD (and maybe 4.0; don't know). This means that there
is no direct connection between the two users. It does, however,
require the ability to write to the person's terminal to annouce that
someone is phoning. I'm sure it could be rewritten to use 4.2-style
sockets, and a central phone server. With that you could turn off
writes so that no one can hang you up, yet still talk to other users.
Eventually perhaps inter-machine conversations will be common.
We're willing to send source for it and for the windows library (which
I still plan to send to net.sources). If you want it send me mail, and
I'll pack up and mail the phone source. Note that the one I can send
will only work if you have CMU IPC.
- Chris
--
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet: chris@umcp-cs
ARPA: chris.umcp-cs@UDel-Relay