--On Tuesday, 28 November, 2006 22:48 +0100 Eliot Lear
<lear@xxxxxxxxx> 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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