About CONNECT

In the spring of 1986, a handful of members of the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute (RPI) began work on a program called the ACM Network Server. It ran on RPI's IBM mainframe, and its purpose was to take advantage of the innovative new networking facilities which had just been made available to programs there, allowing multiple users to simultaneously access a program running on the mainframe. The ACM Network Server was a place for RPI-ACM members to host such multi-user applications. With some help from the staff at the computer center and some serious hacking, the team quickly had a working prototype.

The main application written for the ACM Network server was a real-time computer-mediated conferencing system called CONNECT. It allowed several users to simultaneously connect to it and exchange public and private messages, play multi-user games, and share other text-based information with one another. It also hosted an online consulting service where anyone at RPI could go and get technical help from ACM volunteers.

CONNECT was originally written by Jon Finke, Ron Frederick, Mark Hollinger, Rudy Keiser, and Sandro Wallach. Later on Jim Elliott, Brett Hogden, Peter Lin, Keith Rosenblatt, and Greg Warden also contributed to it.

CONNECT ran for a number of years until May of 1991, when the RPI-ACM was notified that it was using an undue amount of resources on the mainframe and that it would no longer be allowed to run. Despite a frantic effort to keep it going, CONNECT was shut down at 9:00pm on June 30, 1991.

The return of CONNECT

In January of 2012, Ron Frederick began tinkering with a distribution of the Michigan Terminal System (MTS), the mainframe OS which CONNECT was written to run on. It didn't contain all of the components needed to get the original CONNECT code running again, but it inspired Ron to begin hacking on a rewrite of CONNECT in Python, to let people play around with the system again.

On May 18, 2012, Ron had enough of the system working that he opened it up for folks to try out. In order to connect to it, you'll need to "telnet" or "ssh" to the host connect.timeheart.net. If your browser is set up for it, you can also click here to open a telnet or ssh connection.

Here's more detail about how to get to CONNECT from Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

MacOS

Page maintained by Ron Frederick