Thank you Dave, your name was one that I had recognized in the archives! Understanding that it was more of a separate program and interface helps me get a better picture, the CONTACT MEMO you mentioned includes a lot of useful hints as to the interface.
Andrew On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 4:40 AM <dave.g4...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: cctalk <cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Andrew Kay via > > cctalk > > Sent: 24 May 2022 19:12 > > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > <cctalk@classiccmp.org> > > Subject: How did VMSHARE user interface work? > > > > I have been browsing through some of the VMSHARE archives at > > http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/, and I'm curious to know how a user would > > have interacted with this system. I tried finding a "help" file or similar > > within > > the archive itself but couldn't find anything obvious. I think I saw a > > couple of > > names there that I'd seen here so figure this is as good a place as any to > > ask if > > anyone can enlighten me. > > There is still a VM list and some one on their might remember... > Do you know I can't remember the details either! > There were multiple ways to interact. I think at the start we didn't have > terminal connectivity and got daily digests. > > > > > From what I can tell users would connect to a VM host, would they each have > > their own account or was it some shared account? > > > > Once you were connected, was there some special interface to the system - > > or did you just use CMS tools (like XEDIT)? > > It was a specialist padded cell environment. The user names were local to VM > Share. > If you look in > > http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse.cgi?fn=CONTACT&ft=MEMO > > you will see that it was offered by Adesse as "CONTACT" but I can't find > anything docs for that either.. > > > > > It looks like discussions were managed by appending a message to a file (a > > file per topic), was this something that would be done "manually" or was > > there some sort of a script that would take your message and append it to > > the file? > > > > It was all handled in the package > > > How would you know there were new messages in a particular file you were > > interested in? Would you have to open each file (or, perhaps look at its > > modified date) or was there a different interface used to actually read > > messages? > > > > There were commands to list new updates since you last logged in. > > > Thanks in advance :) > > > > > > Andrew > > Dave >
