How did VMSHARE user interface work?

[Andrew Kay]

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.g4ugm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at 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 at 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
>