🚀 go-pugleaf

> Excerpts from mail: 18-May-89 UIUC's notesfile UEJIOWH%ASLCLU.decne@crd
(273)

> What is this UIUC notesfile and where can I get a copy?  Is it Public
domain
> or the source is available.?

Notesfiles was developed by Ray Essick and Rob Kolstad at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with partial support from NASA.  My
understanding is that the source is freely available if you tell the
developers you want it.  I'm not sure exactly where you go to get the
source.  It's been kicking around here at Langley for several years. 
Presumably someone at the CS department at UIUC can tell you how to get
it.  The documentation is report no. UIUCDCS-R-82-1081.

It is a tty-based package (pre-windowing) for managing computer-based
discussions (bulletin boards), and can be interfaced to mail and network
news.  For example, here at ICASE we subscribe to several mailing lists
(xpert, sun-spots, etc.) and pipe the lists into notesfiles.  It has
support for automatically archiving and deleting old notes, and notes
topics on multiple systems can be linked together so that all of the
participating machines will get all of the notes on designated topics.

To summarize, it's been a handy tool for us.  Although I prefer the
Andrew Message System, there are a few things that notesfiles does
better.  For example, notesfiles has one more level of message
organization, so that messages on the same topic (equivalent to an
Andrew folder) with the same subject line are grouped together
chronologically (the paradigm is an initial message on some subject
followed by responses).  This is very handy for high-volume mailing
lists like xpert, where comments on a particular message may trickle in
for weeks after the original posting.  Like Andrew, it keeps track of
what individual users have read, and allows users to subscribe to the
topics of interest to them.  It also has a much nicer interface for
maintainers, as far as controlling permissions, etc.

 
Tom Crockett


                                  ICASE
     Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering

    M.S. 132C                           e-mail:  tom@icase.edu
    NASA Langley Research Center                phone:  (804)
    864-2182
    Hampton,  VA  23665-5225