Tom Abeles wrote: Tom,
We see the conflict clearly with the asynchronous systems like Blackboard where choice is a zero sum game for the owners of the SN.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here -- can you elaborate a bit?
Incidentally others of us had "conferences" on EIES and The Well in those days as well as Caucus. But these were early and most of us were stuck with 300 baud modems and long distance dial up costs to participate.
For me, the good news was that I was using EIES at USC Information Science Institute, which was a local call from my home. The bad news was that I had a 100 bps Teletype with an acoustic coupler. If you look at the report we produced, all of my contributions are in capital letters because the TTY did not do lower case :-). Lar