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Re: IM and Presence history

2006-11-29 05:55:39


--On Tuesday, 28 November, 2006 22:48 +0100 Eliot Lear
<lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:

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).

And there were versions of either finger or whois servers
(probably both) that had "continuous" options.  I would still
claim that today's presence models are a significant change,
especially when they are adapted in a distributed
independently-operated server environment and that real-time
messaging is not.  However, what this subthread demonstrates is
that they were conceptually an incremental change, not a giant,
discontinuous, intellectual leap.   

I thought we all knew that.

       john



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