timeline

Social Software Timeline and Old Memories

Seen on Infocult, the Social Software Timeline.

I'd forgotten how much "text only" computing history there is.

Scary, I actually used The Michigan Terminal System. Everyone called it MTS and it was a trivia question answer to know what MTS stood for. I think the only major competing three letter acronym of the day, at least in Canada, was Manitoba Telephone System.

MTS was used for academic computing by Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the University of BC (UBC). I worked at SFU in the early 80's. I don't remember ever using CONFER but a programmer at UBC (Alan Ballard, I think) wrote a program called Forum that took off like wild fire. I hope I'm not mis-remembering but I believe he wrote it over a weekend. The user interface completely blew away any bulletin board software of the day.

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