Brian Rosen wrote:
If you squint hard enough, everything has already been invented. Telegraph
operators had a form of presence if you squint hard enough.
Presence is a continuously updated 'display' of a set of other people's
status. Finger didn't do that. Yeah, you COULD have used the mechanism to
implement a form of presence, but I don't remember anyone ever doing that,
and if they did, it didn't make anyone sit up and take notice like the IM
folk's buddy status systems did.
Mel Pleasant wrote a program for the DEC-20 called "watch", which was
commonly used on many -20s at the time (this goes back to at least the
early 80s). You would provide a list of individuals you were interested
in watching and the program would sit on top of your EXEC and
occasionally burp out messages that So-And-So has just {logged
{in|out}|attached|detached}. At Rutgers we had a program that sat on
the consoles beneath OPR that would spit out login and logout messages
of anyone who had wheel.
Now if you combined Watch with Toggle, a program that let you blat a one
line message to someone (it also TREPLACEd the EXEC) you had many of the
same IM features you have today (no graphical smileys, bold or italic
facing, or direct file transfers).
Eliot
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