[Shotimes] Old and Crusty

[Carl Prochilo]

Internally in IBM we used to rely on a system called VM that had forums
similar to the format used by the Prodigy bulleting boards.  This was very
heavily used in the 1980s.  Basically you had to be online to read and
reply to the topics.  That's where I cut my teeth on this form of
asynchronous collaboration.

The listserv format came into existance in the 90s and I agree it is very
useful.

I'm also comfortable using the topica setup via the web interface.

The shoforum software is something that is fairly ubiquitous on the
internet these days.  Recently they started to enable e-mail push to
topics you can subscribe to that makes it more useable and doesn't require
you to always go the website to read.

In the end, if you get a reasonable amount of e-mail, then that's probably
easier to manage at an individual level.  But there was a time when
shotimes was delivering over 100 e-mails per day that was too much to deal
with.
-- 
Cheers,
Carl Prochilo
92 Ultra Red Crimson

On Wed, February 9, 2005 11:31 am, Donald Mallinson said:
> Carl,
>
> No I haven't taken any survey of old-timers, but we have
> lost a lot of them over the years, many remain my friends
> even though they haven't owned a SHO in years.
>
> I left Prodigy, like a lot of people when they started
> charging for the section where we had SHO Fast Sedan News,
> that I started in the fall/winter of 1991.  At one point it
> was the oldest continuous thread on prodigy.  Funny, but
> that Forum style format was way ahead of its time, but I
> still prefer the e-mail format we hve here now, to any Forum.
>
> Don Mallinson
>
> Carl Prochilo wrote:
>> Have you taken a count of how many of us are still around?  Not saying
>> it's your job or anything, but if you did, it would be an interesting
>> bit
>> of trivia.
>>
>> There's a thread on techsho about using web interface versus e-mail.  I
>> remember when the prodigy bulletin boards first offered a DOS e-mail
>> client that allowed download and reply capability, and IIRC at some
>> point
>> they started a tiered service offering where they charged for number of
>> e-mail sent.  The e-mail was an important capability back in the day
>> when
>> you used to get hit with connect time charges.  The yung 'uns now take
>> the
>> internet for granted I'm sure and now it's as ubiquitous as drinking
>> water.  And for even more trivia, Prodigy Classic used to run on a 3090
>> (some of you will know what this is) that I worked on in a past life.
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