EIES

The Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES, pronounced eyes) was an early online conferencing bulletin board system that allowed real-time and asynchronous communication. The system was used to deliver courses, conduct conferencing sessions, and facilitate research. Funded by the National Science Foundation and developed from 1974-1978 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) by Murray Turoff based on his earlier EMISARI done at the now-defunct Office of Emergency Preparedness, EIES was intended to facilitate group communications that would allow groups to make decisions based on their collective intelligence rather than the lowest common denominator. Initially conceived as an experiment in computer mediated communication, EIES remained in use for decades because its users "just wouldn't let go" of it, eventually adapting it for legislative, medical and even spiritual uses.

In the mid-1980s, a new version called EIES-2 was developed to research the implementation of group communications in distributed environments, versus the centralized time-sharing environment used for the first version. EIES-2 had an object database architecture using over 2 dozen classes and implementing a notion of activities, which was a standardized interface for implementing nonstandard functions such as polls or list-gathering. The activities concept was similar to what would be done in today's message board applications using plug-ins. The standard message-based functions were also implemented as activities. EIES-2 ran on Unix and was written in the programming languages C and Smalltalk. EIES-2 used the X.400 database standards. Accounts were available to the public for a monthly fee of USD $75 plus connect-time charges.

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