tom@ICASE.EDU (Tom Crockett) (05/19/89)
> Excerpts from mail: 18-May-89 UIUC's notesfile UEJIOWH%ASLCLU.decne@crd (273) > What is this UIUC notesfile and where can I get a copy? Is it Public domain > or the source is available.? Notesfiles was developed by Ray Essick and Rob Kolstad at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with partial support from NASA. My understanding is that the source is freely available if you tell the developers you want it. I'm not sure exactly where you go to get the source. It's been kicking around here at Langley for several years. Presumably someone at the CS department at UIUC can tell you how to get it. The documentation is report no. UIUCDCS-R-82-1081. It is a tty-based package (pre-windowing) for managing computer-based discussions (bulletin boards), and can be interfaced to mail and network news. For example, here at ICASE we subscribe to several mailing lists (xpert, sun-spots, etc.) and pipe the lists into notesfiles. It has support for automatically archiving and deleting old notes, and notes topics on multiple systems can be linked together so that all of the participating machines will get all of the notes on designated topics. To summarize, it's been a handy tool for us. Although I prefer the Andrew Message System, there are a few things that notesfiles does better. For example, notesfiles has one more level of message organization, so that messages on the same topic (equivalent to an Andrew folder) with the same subject line are grouped together chronologically (the paradigm is an initial message on some subject followed by responses). This is very handy for high-volume mailing lists like xpert, where comments on a particular message may trickle in for weeks after the original posting. Like Andrew, it keeps track of what individual users have read, and allows users to subscribe to the topics of interest to them. It also has a much nicer interface for maintainers, as far as controlling permissions, etc. Tom Crockett ICASE Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering M.S. 132C e-mail: tom@icase.edu NASA Langley Research Center phone: (804) 864-2182 Hampton, VA 23665-5225
) (05/19/89)
The notesfiles source code is available for anon-FTP from either uxc.cso.uiuc.edu or a.cs.uiuc.edu. Contrary to the previous note, NCSA did not even exist when the notes package was written. Paul Pomes UofIllinois, CSO