How did VMSHARE user interface work?

[dave.g4ugm at gmail.com]

> -----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