online conferencing
Before the feed, before the forum, there was the conference. Online conferencing is the form of talk the pre-web networks worked out in the 1970s and 1980s: many people, one shared text, and no requirement that anyone be present at the same time. You connected when you could, read what was new since your last visit, answered what you had something to say to, and left. The conversation waited. That patience — asynchronous, threaded, text-first — is not a limitation the form suffered. It is the form.
The unit of conferencing is the item and its responses. A conference is a room devoted to a subject; inside it, an item is one topic, opened by a first text; a response is what the next person appends to it, in order, under their name and the date. The system remembers what each reader has seen, so returning means reading only what is new. Item 8 of the artist conference — the whole of the work this site preserves — is exactly that shape: 241 numbered responses, each elaborating the ones before it, across one year. The shape had been run once before, in 1994, in two rooms at once, by a company of writers that included this item’s opener — My Name is Scibe, written on ARTS WIRE and The WELL.
where it came from
The ancestors are documented. EMISARI, built in 1970 at the U.S. Office of Emergency Preparedness — Murray Turoff among its designers — grew out of the Delphi method of structured group judgment, and during the 1971 wage–price freeze its conferencing carried the work of regional offices that could not meet. PLATO, the University of Illinois teaching system, grew Notes in 1973, written by David Woolley, a sixteen-year-old student employee. EIES, built at the New Jersey Institute of Technology from 1974 under Turoff, ran for decades because, as the record has it, its users would not let it go. And CONFER, written in 1975 at the University of Michigan by graduate student Robert Parnes, fixed the grammar — conferences, items, responses, seen-tracking — that its descendants carried everywhere.
From CONFER the line runs straight to this site. Wikipedia’s history of CONFER names it “the progenitor of the computer conferencing systems Caucus, PicoSpan, and YAPP” — the software of The Meta Network, the software of The WELL, and the software of Michigan’s long-running M-Net, whose YAPP conferences use the identical grammar: a host titled “fairwitness,” items holding an author’s text with responses appended in order, each reader shown only what is new. A community history of conferencing in Ann Arbor, where so much of this began, says it plainly: Confer “pioneered the structure that has become the standard on most modern computer conferencing systems.”
why it shaped the writing
A form that waits is a form that thinks. Because a response might come days later and be read by everyone in the room, conferencing prose tends toward the composed: the writers of item 8 quote each other, answer each other, correct themselves in public, and write at the length the thought needs rather than the length a chat window allows. The hosts who kept the rooms mattered as much as the software — see the village. And the road into the room — dial-up, telnet, per-hour charges — set the tempo: see from telnet to the web.
consulted sources
Wikipedia, “CONFER (software)” — the progenitor line, and Parnes
Hiltz & Turoff, The Network Nation (1978) — EMISARI, the Delphi beginnings, and EIES
The Computer History Museum, on EMISARI and the Network Nation — Turoff’s account of the 1971 freeze
The PLATO history — David Woolley and Notes, 1973
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