EIES

~ the goodbye ~

Murray Turoff had already built one of these. At the Office of Emergency Preparedness he wrote EMISARI, a system for running the 1971 wage and price freeze, where officials scattered across the country had to reach an answer together and could not be in one room. He took that idea to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, got National Science Foundation money for it, and the Electronic Information Exchange System went live in 1976.

It was built for scientists who needed to argue over months rather than minutes. You joined a conference, read what had accumulated since your last visit, and added to it. There were private messages, a member directory, notebooks people wrote in together, and a system of anonymous and pen-name posting that Turoff put in deliberately so that junior researchers could contradict senior ones. Starr Roxanne Hiltz studied what happened to the people using it and published the results, which makes EIES one of the few systems of that era with measurements attached.

At its height it carried more than two thousand subscribers. NASA was on it, so were Exxon and IBM, alongside universities that had no other way to run a working group across four time zones. Stewart Brand and Alvin Toffler had accounts. When it was finally switched off it was still handling a thousand people at once with response times under fifteen seconds, which is a number worth sitting with.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what they ran on it ~

In 1985 Connected Education started offering a masters degree in media studies that existed entirely inside EIES. No campus, no classroom, no residency requirement. Students in different countries read the same conference and wrote into it on their own schedule, which is asynchronous online education in its complete modern form, running on a minicomputer, fifteen years before anybody sold it as a business.

The other thing it hosted was itself. A large share of the early academic literature on computer-mediated communication was researched by people who were using EIES to research EIES, publishing papers about online groups in an online group. That circularity is why the system is well documented and why the documentation reads like it was written by participants rather than about them.

~ the second system ~

In the mid-eighties came EIES 2, rewritten to study group communication across distributed machines rather than one central host. The original stayed up until 1992 and the second version carried on after that. Two generations of the same idea ran for a combined twenty-four years without ever becoming a consumer product, which was never the point of it.

~ what got buried with it ~

It died of a file format. By the late nineties every user expected to attach a document, and EIES was text and only ever text, built when a terminal was a printer and a line was 110 baud. NJIT went looking for a replacement and could not find one that matched what it already had. That is the detail that stays with me: an institution shutting down a system in 2000 while admitting nothing available was as good.

What went with it was the accumulated shape of a conference that had run for years. Threaded group memory with a membership that knew each other, activity data going back to the seventies, and a set of design decisions about anonymity and about who can see what which nobody carried forward, because the products that replaced it were built by people who had never logged in.

~ the next chapter ~

Turoff and Hiltz wrote a book in 1978 called The Network Nation which described most of what happened to the world between 1995 and 2010, from working at home to the collapse of distance in professional collaboration. They had the evidence because they were running the experiment. The book was reissued in 1993 and the predictions were still ahead of the reality.

EIES was live during my first two years online, and I had no idea it existed. That is the part I find hard to get past. In 1998 I was on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, and there was a twenty-two year old conferencing system in New Jersey doing things better than most of what I was using, sitting behind an academic subscription with no reason ever to show itself to me. The web made everything visible and made everything before it invisible at the same time. Almost nothing that mattered on the pre-web networks got a link, so my generation started from a blank page and rebuilt it badly.

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