EIES
More info
- Creator
- Murray Turoff
- Released
- 1976
- Type
- Computer conferencing system
The Electronic Information Exchange System at NJIT, where computer conferencing was studied as a social phenomenon before it had properly become one.
In 1971 Murray Turoff had built EMISARI, a conferencing system for the US government's emergency-preparedness office during Nixon's wage and price freeze. At the New Jersey Institute of Technology he took the idea further, and EIES went live in 1976 with National Science Foundation funding. Research groups scattered across the country could hold threaded discussions, exchange messages and co-write documents from a terminal and a modem.
What set it apart was that it was measured. Turoff and sociologist Starr Roxanne Hiltz studied how groups behaved online and wrote The Network Nation (1978), which anticipated much of what every later generation of social networks rediscovered for itself. The same year, Jacob Palme launched the Swedish KOM system, part of the same early wave.