CRLT:CONFER is oldest program known to have had some direct bearing on what was eventually implemented as lily. It was a program written by Bob Parnes at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It was written in Fortran, probably in the early or mid 1970's. The original versions ran on the MTS operating system, although I believe it was eventually ported to VM/CMS, and perhaps some other operating systems.

If I remember correctly, it was originally intended as a way to conduct "online democracy" of sorts. One person would enter an "item", which could be a long description of something they wanted others to vote on. And then everyone else would enter votes. I believe that initially the votes had to be specific values, such as "yes/no", or "on a scale from 1 to 5". But then people wanted to add free-form comments to their votes. As people asked for more features, CONFER became more of a general communication program, and items were not strictly limited to taking votes.

Aside: Under MTS, the filesystem had a two-level hierarchy, the userid and the filename. So, the filename of "CRLT:CONFER" was the program called CONFER, under the userid CRLT. CRLT was the name of a major department at the UofM, the "Center for Research on Learning and Teaching", so you can understand why they would be interested in the kinds of communication that CONFER was used for. And in fact, CRLT is still there: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/

CONFER had the idea of "conferences", which was a set of people considered to be in a single group, and that group would be the people voting on these various items. Conferences were permitted to specific userids, so you could only "join" a conference if someone gave you access to it.

One of the conferences at UofM was used by the developers of MTS itself. This included people at the University of Michigan, but it also included developers the other sites which also worked on the MTS operating system. When it comes to the development of lily, the two most notable sites which ran MTS are the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada, and RPI in Troy, New York. One of the programmers who worked on MTS at UBC would go on to write *FORUM, and it was *FORUM which was installed at RPI.

-- GaranceDrosehn - 02 Feb 2006
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