[Air-l] What is Instant Messaging

[aoir.z3z at danah.org]

>  From all the articles I have read Zephyr did not have anything like a
> simple pop up list that showed a list of buddies at one time that could
> be kept up as a peripheral awareness display which showed online status
> of users.  

It depends on the version that was used.  The nice thing about zephyr was
that it was open source and it ran on UNIX which meant that you could
attach a ton of scripts to it.  At Brown, there were heavy modifications
of zephyr by and for computer science students.  The default dotfiles
included zwrites and .anyones and a lot of scripts associated with the
two. The buddylist consisted of a .anyone file and a script that looked
for that file and displayed the account, name, seat in the lab and idle
time in a sticky popup window that was always on top of everything else.  
No, it wasn't the same source as zephyr, but neither were the variety of
scripts that were associated with zwrite (such as the auto-responses, the
auto-logging, the hacks to trick finger, the shortcut commands for auto
zwriting predefined messages such as "food?", the zlocate command to see
if somenoe was allowing zwrites, the ability to zwrites whole groups of
people at once, etc.).  But it was home-brewed Brown CS unix and no one
cared to integrate them all since we copied each others' dotfiles and it
was all one big hack anyhow.

The zwrite-experience was a slew of scripts that were tailored to give the
user an integrated instant messaging experience.  My first year students
never knew that they were unrelated.  As far as anyone was concerned, the
.anyones in the upper corner of the screen were part of zwrite (because
they were used as such) and i even know some students who mucked with
their .anyone popups to be buttons so that you could click and start a
zwrite.  More common though were key shortcuts to auto-zwrite someone a
message (i still remember that ctrl-meta-b was an auto-zwrite to a friend
asking to procrastinate with me and play the game Battletris).  

Honestly, Quentin, i couldn't tell you what was part of the zephyr code
and what was a set of scripts that we used at Brown.  I do know that i was
shocked when i went to MIT to find out that their zephyr didn't have the
same interface (ours were non-sticky windows that had at least buttons on
them, including "quit" "reply" and "reply & quote" and there were a lot of
shortcut keys to mouse over a zwrite and do stuff like respond and
quick-reply and whatnot; if you clicked on the zwrite it didn't go away 
like the MIT version).

danah

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