This discussion is a place to gather information about the computer conferencing program, CONFER. The information was used to develop the Wikipedia article on CONFER that became available on 25 May 2011. |
CONFER
x'0A' (10). Confer 40th Reunion - 2015
There is talk about holding a "Confer 40th reunion" in 2015 in Ann Arbor. The conversation started with a status post from Maya Bernstein and is continuing in a group with the name "Confer 40th Reunion - 2015", both on Facebook. Maya's original status post: https://www.facebook.com/maya.bernstein/posts/10152194144934088 (not everyone will have access to this post). |
9. CONFER is also the Ferrari of computer conferencing (Byte Magazine 1985)
A page from the article "An Overview of Conferencing Systems" by Brock N. Meeks in Byte Magazine, Volume 10, Number 13, December 1985, page 184: |
8. A History of Online Information Services: 1963 - 1976
I was looking for information on AUTONOTE based on a mention in A History of Online Information Services: 1963 - 1976Charles Percy Bourne, Trudi Bellardo HahnThe MIT Press http://books.google.com/books?id=LTTvmUU8rskC&pg=PA92&dq=Michigan+Terminal+System&hl=en&sa=X&ei=aPC3Ub_5AcTRyAGHoYG4AQ&ved=0CFgQ6AEwCA) Chapter 3: Further Experimentation and Prototypes in Universities, Mid-1960s to Early 1970s page 92: and got this reply: On Jun 12, 2013, at 12:49 AM, Mike Alexander wrote: Yes, I remember it. Karl Zinn's papers at the Bentley contain "Autonote User's Manual, July 20, 1971" in box 20. I also found this in the User:Planning archives. It only mentions Autonote in passing, but is interesting for other reasons: Jan05/86 22:42 75:10) Karl Zinn: Confer has been used in dozens of different classes in the last ten years. The important difference this fall, as pointed out by Maya (#9), was initiative of students along with commitment of resources for undergraduate classes. Finally CRLT can recommend and support practical and widespread use of this tool in which we have made (relatively) major investments over the last 15 years. - - - - - Jan06/86 11:52 75:11) Christine Wendt: Fifteen? But K4QQ:RP.CONFER wasn't even born until 1975! - - - - - Jan18/86 15:08 75:12) Karl Zinn: Chris, my response to #11 is somewhat delayed by long hours helping new classes get started with Confer this term. (Anyone else volunteer to help out?) My interest in conferencing was ignited in '64 by a visit to Doug Engelbart at SRI. Anyone remember the big screen (video projection) demo he did at FJCC in San Francisco a few years later? The "major investment" by CRLT began about '71 with Project Extend's use of various facilities on MTS for communications among community college users of MTS. I'd have to check my notes to name all the various things we tried. (Anyone k now about Autonote?) Mostly we adopted conventions for using shared files (relatively cheap and easy) for mail and joint authoring. I recall one of the early proposals for Merit (back when it was MERIT, and really a "research information triad") was done through such "conferencing" activity. I didn't have time to find my notes on the history of MERIT, MICIS, IUCIUC and the CRLT proposal to the state ('64, I think) when Research News did an issue on Merit, but I know they are still around. Bob's contribution in 74-75 (and continuing through the present!) was to make something reliable, economical, functional, easy-to-use and responsive to the evolving needs and interests of users! Bob has given us "the Ferrari of computer conferencing." (Byte, Dec 85, p184) Finding that Byte article might be interesting. Mike |
7. Photos
Click on photos to enlarge. Bob Parnes is on the left, Kitty Bridges is on the right, but who is the follow in the middle? Meet:Students t-shirt (front and back): Sunday in the Park with Parnes First annual USER:OPENFORUM and USER:FORUM picnic at Delhi Park, Sunday, 13 July 1986. This is a color version provided by John Dorsey (13th from the left in the front row) of a B&W photo that appeared on page 3 of the U-M Computing News, University of Michigan Computing Center, v.1 #2, 11 August 1986 L to R, front row: Hershey, Betsy and Trevor Sell, Rachelle Lesko, John
and Charlie Gray, Laurie Burns and Carol Gray, Jon Sell, Roy Leban, Ada
Finifter, Richard Wiggins, John Dorsey, Maya Bernstein, Spot, Shifrah
Nenner, Jeff Ogden, Beaumont, Gregory Rittinger. Middle row: Kathy Aupperle, Howard Chu, Pat McGregor, Susan Harris, Laura Bollettino, Judy Shapiro, Debbie Fisch, Lee Redding, Cynthia Abel, Cindy Valerio, Vicki Neff and Molly, Tom Valerio, Paul Scott. Top row: Al Anderson, Harry Clark, Charles Roth, Bob Parnes, Dennis Holt, Suzanne Schluederberg, Christine Wendt, Ed Vielmetti, Eric Sobocinski, Bob Rasmussen. Two more Confer t-shirts, softball and basketball this time: Front, the back is blank: Front: Back: |
6. Existing mentions on Wikipedia
1995: WebTeach, a web-based asynchronous communication system using
chronological threads in the 'Confer' style originally developed in the
mid 70s by Robert Parnes, was first used in 1995 in the Professional
Development Centre at UNSW.
The Michigan Terminal System (MTS), a computer time-sharing operating system developed at the University of Michigan, included a program called CONFER developed by Robert Parnes that gave it the capabilities of computer conferencing.[82]
In the early days collaboration between the MTS sites was accomplished
through a combination of face-to-face site visits, phone calls, the
exchange of documents and magnetic tapes by snail mail, and informal get-togethers at SHARE
or other meetings. Later, e-mail, computer conferencing using Confer
and Forum, network file transfer, and e-mail attachments supplemented
and eventually largely replaced the earlier methods. Programs developed for MTS: Confer II, one of the first computer conferencing systems. Confer was developed by Robert Parnes starting in 1975 while he was a graduate student and with support from the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT).[41][42]
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5. Where was CONFER installed?
In addition to the information that follows, see the following discussion items elsewhere in the MTS Archive: From: "Bob Parnes" Date: November 17, 2010 1:59:31 PM EST To: "'Jeff Ogden'" Subject: RE: can you help me identify someone in a photo? Hi Jeff, . . . As to locations of Confer-MTS, my recollection is that they had been installed at UM, UMB, WSU, Alberta, and HP. I submitted a proposal to have it installed at NASA (somewhere in California but I can’t remember where now), but it didn’t get funded. A Unix version of Confer was created and installed at WMU, and that got back ported to Michigan at some point. The Unix version was also used by the Research Library Group for a while. I don’t have any recollection of MSU having licensed MTS or Confer. I suspect Rich could provide a definitive answer to that one. Best regards, (bob) From: Jeff Ogden Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 4:53 PM To: bob Subject: Re: can you help me identify someone in a photo? . . . Rich remembers MTS being installed at MSU to run Confer at Paul Hunt's instigation), Paul was the MSU CIO at the time. Two other MSU staff members don't remember MTS being installed, but they are bowing to Rich's memory as am I. I'm pretty sure that MTS was installed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. I thought it was to run Confer. But perhaps it was just a trial setup. I'll dig around a bit more to see what is written down and what others remember. -Jeff On Jan 29, 2012, at 9:27 PM, Bob Parnes wrote: Hi Zoe and Neda! There was definitely a version of Confer that was created for the VAX environment at Western Michigan University. I remember driving back and forth to Kalamazoo many times to discuss and guide the creation of Confer V there. I am pretty sure Confer V was created before Confer U. Ron Schubot did a lot of the prodding and tech support to make it happen at WMU, and he did have the administrative support of his computer center director. Norm Grant at WMU wrote all the Confer V code in an amazingly short time, as I recall. . . . On Jan 29, 2012, at 10:07 PM, Bob Parnes wrote: Jeff, The "V" in Confer V was not a numeric indicator as was the II in Confer II. Rather it was used to indicate the VAX [VMS] version, just like the "U" was used to indicate the UNIX version. Had I known there would be other Operating System versions back in 1975 when I started work on Confer, I might have called the second version (it got named just a few months after I created the original draft I called Confer) Confer M rather than Confer II. But calling it II made sense at the time. The II designation happened after I figured out how to add responses to items. I wanted to signal to some faculty who had seen the original primitive "first draft" that I now had something more substantial to look at. Thanks for all your hard work in preserving our little corner of history. Oh, by the way, there never was a Confer III or Confer IV. I just kept updating Confer II and providing a last change date for it instead of releasing new roman numeral versions. (bob) From: Jeff Ogden Sent: Monday, January 30, 2012 3:51 PM To: Bob Parnes Cc: 'Zoe Gurevich'; 'Neda Gholizadeh' Subject: Re: news from the MTS archiving / preservation / resurrection project Thanks Bob. . . . And just let me verify a few things:
From: "Bob Parnes" <bob@bparnes.com> Subject: RE: news from the MTS archiving / preservation / resurrection project Date: January 30, 2012 4:44:48 PM EST To: "'Jeff Ogden'" <jeff.ogden@umich.edu> Cc: "'Zoe Gurevich'", "'Neda Gholizadeh'" Jeff, . . . You are correct on the “few things” you asked me to verify. To amplify on the last thing, Merrill Flood is the one who got me started thinking about Computer Conferencing with lots of initial under-the-radar support from some faculty at the School of Education including Fred Goodman and Lee Collett (but many others including Carl Berger I suspect as well). Karl Zinn was quick to identify the potential significance of what I was undertaking and he then quickly managed to find a position and funding for me at CRLT where I could get a grad student salary from CRLT to support his efforts to disseminate what I was doing to the University and beyond. That is, CRLT did not pay me to develop Confer; that was all done on my own time. Karl’s great skill was recognizing good projects and helping to get them nourished and disseminated. Merrill was able to plant the seed in the first place that I then turned into a project. Fred Goodman and Lee Collett were my mentors inside the School of Education; without their mentoring it is unlikely that a school of education would have put up with what I was doing there as a PhD candidate. There were many others who joined in along the way. The folks at Merit, especially Chris Wendt, deserve special mention as well in convincing me that, early on, I was on to something worthwhile with their adoption of Confer to support their efforts. And, of course, the Computing Center was generous with their support of Confer once it got going. This feels like I’m writing the acknowledgement that I should have written in my dissertation, but didn’t mostly because I did not yet then have the wisdom of hindsight. (bob) |
4. Arab-Israli Conflict Simulation
"Institutional Gaming through the use of Computer Conferencing", Fredrick L. Goodman, In Empowering networks: computer conferencing in education, Michael Waggoner (Ed.), 1992, pp. 101-126 Arab-Israli Conflict Web site: http://aic.conflix.org/ Arab-Israli Conflict Web site, Interactive Communications & Simulations, University of Michigan-Flint and Ann Arbor: http://ics.soe.umich.edu/main/section/2 "Politics and Computers" in U-M Computing News, University of Michigan Computing Center, pp. 3-4, v.1, #8, 10 November 1986 The use of Confer by Fred Goodman and Edgar Taylor of the School of Education, and Raymond Tanter in Political Science at U-M, in their courses Poll Sci 471, "American Foreign Policy Process" and Poli Sci 353, "Arab-Israeli Conflict." |
3. Other items
Conferencing: In concert with Kari Gluski, PAM for
communications and Carol Kamm, project leader for web services, U-M
Online has been investigating web based conferencing options.
The initial plan called for replacing confer (due to expense) by
September.
Following active research for scaleable web based conferencing, the
team concluded the September goal was not doable.
As an interim solution, Confer developer Bob Parnes was contacted.
He has agreed to lower his fee from $2.00 per subscriber to 25 cents.
With the lower fee, U-M Online can afford to stay with Confer until a
suitable web based alternative is available.
PLATO Notes is the progenitor of:
Here are some other first-generation conferencing
systems that emerged in the early to mid-1970's:
Centralized ForumsCentralized forum software originated on mainframes in the early to mid-1970's with systems like PLATO Notes, Confer, and EIES. These were designed specifically for group discussion, and they treat messages as part of an ongoing conversation with some inherent structure. Discussions are stored on one central computer, and each new message is assigned a place in the discussion structure immediately upon being posted. Over the years this line of software has evolved sophisticated features for managing and participating in conversations. Within this arena, there is another identifiable subgroup of products whose designs have been derived from Confer, a system originally developed in 1975 by Robert Parnes. I call these products "WELL-style" conferencing systems, because the WELL has been very influential in spreading this design. There are a number of features that tend to appear in WELL-style conferencing software, but the most readily identifiable feature is that it structures discussions as linear chains of responses, and displays each discussion as a continuous stream of text. Examples of WELL-style Web conferencing software include:
Examples of other centralized forum software for the Web include:
MTS Fostered Creation of Computing Community, by Susan Topol, Information Technology Digest, Volume 5, Number 5, 13 May 1996, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, pp. 1, 27-29. According to
Bob Parnes, architect of the Confer system, "MTS was our
system; it belonged to the University, not to a corporation." Confer became a common means of communication as students organized their own conferences and CRLT staff members convinced instructors to set up course-related conferences. "MTS and Merit/UMnet allowed many people to communicate electronically for the first time both one-to-one — using e-mail — or one-to-many — using e-mail, newsgroups, and conferencing," said Christine Wendt, then computer systems consultant for Merit. "So many people today are impressed by the Internet and the World Wide Web, but after more than 15 years of conferencing and e-mail using MTS, I have a feeling of 'been there, done that.'"
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2. CONFER references
From the MTS Bibliography at http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/bibliography:
Abstract: Computing and telecommunications were used during the Second
International Congress of the International Society for Technology
Assessment (ISTA) to facilitate the discussion and contribute to the
Congress report. In particular, the telecommunications activity was
designed to enhance interaction on substantive issues and convergence on
conclusions and interpretations. Only incidentally were we conducting
an experiment or trial (with support from NSF) for a community of
potential users of computer-aided conferencing.
See also: http://nro-dd.sagepub.com/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/confer-at-the-ista-congress-BIC1lhJAJy
p. 232, Confer: One of the first better known systems, Confer was developed in the mid-1970s at The University of Michigan by Dr. Robert Parnes. It has been described as one of the most sophisticated of all the systems. Its development has been closely tied to the MTS operating system (see below) which has to date limited its portability to other types of computer systems.
p. 233, Michigan Terminal System (MTS): A proprietary operating system developed at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It is the operating system for Confer. Several universities around the world are users of this unique computing environment.
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