A history related post copied from a.f.c. ng: Timeline: The evolution of online communities http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135308/Timeline_The_evolution_of_online_communities
from above: E-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, BBSs, Usenet groups and more all played a role in the development of online communities as we know them today. ... snip ... cp67 & vm370 had real time messages on the same real system and then supported by rscs/vnet that would forward such messages between remote systems ... internal network was larger than arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime late '85 or early '86. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet Tymshare supported online conferencing early 70s ... and made the facility "free" to SHARE VM group in Aug76: http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/ in the late 70s and early 80s I got blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network doing semi-automated mailing list operation ... recent reference in this n.g. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#26 Microminiaturized Modules the above some major motivation behind "official" effort that resulted in the internal TOOLSRUN ... which could simultaneously operate somewhat similar to USENET and mailing list (i.e. somebody could subscribe as mailing list ... or setup TOOLSRUN "client" that would subscribe and maintain local repository of posts). Listserv on BITNET, misc. past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet was somewhat to duplicate at least part of the TOOLSRUN function discussed here (starting Paris, 1985 ... i.e. the EARN part of BITNET) http://www.lsoft.com/products/listserv-history.asp related email (from Paris) regarding setting up EARN http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#email840320 in this post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#65 and looking for network-oriented applications for the educational institution users. There is also esample of the distributed evolution of the REX language implementation in the late 70s and early 80s (leveraging the internal network) ... some discussion here: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/rexx/library/rexxhist.html and here: http://web.archive.org/web/20020506063424/http://computinghistorymuseum.org/ieee/af_forum/read.cfm?forum=10&id=21&thread=7 the author of rexx ... had also done a multi-user space war game for cms (on 3270s) that used the rscs/vnet forwarding interface to extend the game into distributed environment across multiple machines in the network. somewhat as the result for getting blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network in the late 70s and early 80s ... there was a researcher that was paid to sit in the back of my office for nine months and take notes on how I communicated (as well go with me to meetings). They also got copies of all my incoming and outgoing email as well as logs of all my instant messages. The result was an internal corporate report ... but also Stanford Phd thesis (joint between language and computer AI) as well as some number of papers and books ... misc. past posts mentioning computer mediated conversation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#cmc -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970
