A Brief History of CoSy

U of Guelph

CoSy's roots trace back to a 1983 proposal at the University of Guelph's (Ontario, Canada) Computer Sciences Center for a text-based computer conferencing system. The original outline (it wasn't a design yet) was called "Confer", and there was discussion of implementing it on top of the existing APL-based mail system.

Alastair Mayer became involved at this stage, along with [authors], in the requirements and design discussions. An early decision was to cut loose from the legacy APL mail system and implement it in C on Unix. One key to CoSy's success was the time spent on usability, with a draft user manual and numerous chalkboard walkthroughs with potential users to get early feedback. All of this backed by Alastair's insight into what could be implemented and how.

Initial development was done using borrowed time on the CS department's VAX. The first version was quickly brought to the point where it itself served as a vechicle for discussion of later refinements and improvements. Later we would move it to our own PDP 11/34, and then to a Unix (UTS) partition on the campus IBM mainframe.

BIX and BYTE

The magazine tie-ins.

In 1984, Guelph hosted a conference on Computer Conferencing and Electronic Messaging. As part of the standard publicity efforts, various trade publications were notified, including BYTE Magazine. As it happened, BYTE at the time had a project to set up their own conferencing system for BYTE readers, to be called BIX (Byte Information Exchange). Clearly interested in the subject, Byte's George Bond (and Phil Lemmons?) came to the conference.

While there, they saw a demo of CoSy and were immediately interested. So interested, in fact, that although they were already proceeding on the BIX project with another vendor's conferncing software, they considered dropping that and going with CoSy. The following weekend, Alastair Mayer and Ted Swart flew out to Byte's offices in Peterborogh, New Hampshire, and while Alastair got CoSy up and running on a test machine in Byte's office, Ted and Phil Lemmons hammered out a letter of intent. A few months later, BIX launched to a beta test with Byte columnists (including Jerry Pournelle) and members of the Boston Computer Society. Within a year it had thousands of members -- this at a time when a 2400 bps dialup modem was considered fast.

Similar computer-magazine conferencing projects were begun in Japan (Nikkei-Byte's MIX) and England (CIX), they too became quite successful.

Over the years, BIX changed hands several times. It outlived the hardcopy BYTE Magazine, but some bizarre management policies, including severe restrictions on signing up new members, led BIX to shut down in 2001. However, CIX and MIX are still going strong (with graphical interfaces to the underlying CoSy systems)

Distribution

CIX and MIX are still going strong (with graphical interfaces to the underlying CoSy systems)

Softwords

U of Guelph later transferred CoSy distribution rights to Softwords of B.C., Canada, who dropped it from active support around 1997, with the rise in popularity of web-based systems.

GPL

Some former BIX users persuaded U of Guelph and Softwords to release the old CoSy source under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and started a CoSy-based service known as NLZ,

NL Zero

started a CoSy-based service known as NLZ, for Noise Level Zero (nlzero.com). Alastair Mayer was instrumental in bringing "Classic CoSy" up to a state where NLZ could go live.