CONFER is one of the first computer conferencing systems. Highly sophisticated for its time, it was developed in 1975 at the University of Michigan by then graduate student Robert Parnes. The CONFER system continued to be a widely used communication tool until 1999. CONFER is the progenitor of the computer conferencing systems Caucus, PicoSpan, and YAPP.
Origins and history
CONFER was developed in the mid-1970s when University of Michigan experimental psychology graduate student Bob Parnes attended a seminar where Professor Merrill M. Flood discussed aspects of electronic mail and conferencing on group decision making. Flood had a magnetic tape of a prototype system and approached Parnes about getting it to run on the Michigan Terminal System (MTS), the university's time-sharing system. Parnes declined, but offered instead to attempt writing a similar program for MTS. With encouragement from Fred Goodman and LeVerne Collet at the School of Education and Karl Zinn at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT), CONFER was developed.
Because of a graduate teaching assistant strike, Parnes was temporarily relieved of his teaching duties and had some extra time to devote to his experimental system, which he called "CONFER". MTS served as an excellent development environment for CONFER, which was built on top of the MTS file structure and exploited its file sharing features. According to Parnes, "I don't think I could have written CONFER anywhere but on MTS." MTS at U-M and later at Wayne State University (WSU) was a good match for CONFER because both systems were attached to the Merit Network and thus had a broader reach within Michigan via Merit and within the U.S. and internationally via Merit's interconnections to Telenet (later SprintNet), Tymnet, ADP's Autonet, and later still the IBM Global Network and the Internet.
Parnes' vision of the system was one where the individual group participant would alternate between being a producer and being a consumer of information. The unique CONFER feature in this regard was initially the functionality of the "vote." This feature allowed the consumer to voice their "feelings" or opinion on a statement by voting.
Parnes went on to form his own company — Advertel Communication Systems, Inc. — which marketed and supported CONFER.
The CONFER system continued to be a widely used communication tool until 1999. By this time, U-M, WSU, and the University of Alberta had moved from the Michigan Terminal System to distributed computing environments and several newer digital technologies replaced the functionality provided by CONFER.
Sites where CONFER was used
In addition to the University of Michigan CONFER was used at Wayne State University (WSU), the University of Alberta (UQV), Michigan State University (MSU), and at Hewlett-Packard (HP). MSU and HP both ran MTS so they could run CONFER. A Unix version, known as CONFER U, was created by the University of Michigan's Information Technology Division and used at U-M and at the Research Libraries Group. A version for the DEC VMS operating system, known as CONFER V, was created and used at Western Michigan University (WMU). The work on CONFER U at U-M and on CONFER V at WMU was done with the encouragement of and guidance from Bob Parnes.
Features
CONFER provides facilities for online discussion of topics of general interest. Discussions are organized around "conferences" that focus on a topic, a group or community, or an event. Conferences may be "public" (open to anyone with an account on the host system where CONFER runs) or private (invitation only). Each conference has one or more organizers. Individuals join conferences as participants, auditors, or observers. Conferences are accessed using terminals from various locations, allowing discussion without having to meet physically or participate at the same time.
As a system developed in the mid-1970s, CONFER is a text oriented, command driven system with extensive prompts and online help. It does not have a graphical user interface (but see InfoX below) or allow the display of photographs or other graphics.