README file for Discuss 1.6 (September 1991).

This is the root directory of Discuss, an electronic conferencing
system developed by the MIT Student Information Processing Board
(SIPB).  This tree contains the Discuss sources and documentation.

Description:
Discuss is a distributed electronic conferencing system that allows
users to communicate in a set of electronic "meetings".  The concepts
surrounding Discuss and a description of various design decisions can
be found in the Winter 1989 Usenix proceedings; a copy of this paper
can be found in ./doc/usenix.  In short, Discuss provides public and
private meetings, where transactions (messages) are stored
indefinitely.  Discuss uses a client/server model of networking;
clients contact servers over TCP/IP streams to access individual
meetings.  To authenticate users over the network, Discuss uses the
Kerberos authentication system, developed by MIT's Project Athena
(available separately).  In the single machine case, Discuss does not
rely on Kerberos.

Discuss is being released in the hopes that it will be useful to the
outside world.  The release is not as polished as that of Project
Athena's Kerberos, but that is to be expected from a system that has
resulted from part-time efforts.  Discuss was inspired by experience
with Multics forum;  although Discuss has not reached the elegance and
sophistication of Multics forum, it has allowed people to communicate
in a useful way.

Copyright notice:

Copyright 1989-1991 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Developed by the MIT Student Information Processing Board.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this
software and its documentation for any purpose and without
fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright
notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright
notice and this permission notice appear in supporting
documentation, and that the name of M.I.T. not be used in
advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the
software without specific, written prior permission.
M.I.T. makes no representations about the suitability of
this software for any purpose.  It is provided "as is"
without express or implied warranty.

Installation:
Discuss, as distributed, uses normal UNIX-style make files (no imake).
See the "Install" file in this directory for installation
instructions.

History/Acknowledgments:
Discuss was originally conceived and implemented in 1986 as a part
time project of three members of the MIT SIPB: Stan Zanarotti (LCS),
Ken Raeburn (IS), and Bill Sommerfeld (Project Athena).  Later,
additional development came from other SIPB members, namely Rob
French, Brian LaMacchia, Ted Ts'o, Jon Rochlis, and Barry Jaspan.
dsgrep was written by Lucien Van Elsen, a Project Athena employee.
Nancy Gilman, a SIPB member, has helped document Discuss for
mortal users.

We would like to thank the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, 
MIT Information Systems and MIT Project Athena for their support of
Discuss.