History of Connect


lily's Grandmother

Portions of this section are based on The Connect User's Guide, dated Saturday, September 23, 1989. I am indebted to the authors of that document, who I haven't even bothered to contact in the preparation of this one.

The club

Clover was written by students at RPI who affiliated themselves with an or- ganization called the ACM (more formally, the Rensselaer Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Union sponsored club). The RPI-ACM is a Student Chapter of the international ACM, founded in 1947 as a professional society of the computing community. The international or- ganization is "dedicated to the development of information processing as a discipline, and to the responsible use of computers in an increasing diversity of applications."

The RPI-ACM reflects this philosophy in its undertaking of programming projects, and providing innovative computer services to the RPI community. The RPI-ACM attempts to cater to both computer fanatics, people who just want to learn more about computers on all levels, and people who wish to incorporate computers in their daily lives.

The program

About 1980, MTS was running a conferencing system called *FORUM (sim- ilar to Usenet, but limited to RPI in general) where people could post mes- sages. Members of the ACM would use *FORUM, however, to attempt to carry on interactive conversations. Since these conversations usually took place at the only decent time of the day (after 3 am when the rates were cheapest), this was called "Vamp Mode". Eventually, somebody wrote a program to hide the non-interactiveness of *FORUM messages. It worked, but it was very messy, and very expensive in "account money".

Eventually, people realized how inefficient this was, and decided to write a new program designed specifically to allow people to carry on interactive conversations. In about 1984, the ACM:CB program was made available. Since MTS account names typically made no sense, it allowed users to come up with their own "handles" or pseudonyms. There were a limited number of available channels, which people could allocate for specific discussions. This wasn't quite as expensive as running Vamp Mode, but it still was a drain on MTS funds that could be used to do things like... homework.

In the Spring of 1986, members of the RPI-ACM began work on a program called the ACM Network Server, whose purpose was to use the (then new and innovative) networking facilities available through the campus mainframe to allow multiple people to simultaneously use a variety of programs available from the server. With some help from ITS and some serious hacking, a working prototype was produced relatively quickly.

The Network Server was the platform for its perhaps most recognized use - Connect. Connect was designed to be a "real time conferencing system" which was capable of juggling upwards of fifty users at a time, exchanging messages between them. For its time, Connect was a highly advanced sys- tem, once called the "Rolls Royce" of Computer Mediated Communications. In its later years, members of the RPI community used Connect for a broad range of uses. Since it used the network services, each user didn't have to pay MT$ to run the program. This was considered a definite advantage. (One of the original authors gives their perspective on Connect.)

Connect was the inspiration for a number of projects, and was RPI's entry in the arena of CMCs. (Some others currently widely used will be described in the next section.) In particular, many users of Connect envisioned it's successor - Connect-2. Connect-2 was a highly complex Object Oriented CMC (designed long before the phrase Object Oriented became a buzzword) which was the ACM's most popular vaporware. It also led to the eventual development of Clover.

In May of 1991, shortly after most students had gone home from the summer, the officers of the RPI-ACM were notified that Connect was using an undue amount of resources on the Mainframe, and that it would no longer be allowed to run. Despite a frantic effort to keep it going, ACM-Connect was shut down at 2100 hours on 30 June, 1991.


The lily CMC / webmaster@lily.org / 3 Jun 1995