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 -- - - - - - - - - - d a n a h ( d o t ) o r g - - - - - - - - - and they say that the truth will set you free but then again, so will a lie it depends if you're trying to get to the promised land or if you're just trying to get by - - Bring V-Day to your community: www.vday.org/organize - - - - Attend a V-Day event near you: events.vday.org/search - -