DISCUSS is a project started by Bill Sommerfeld, Ken Raeburn, and Stan Zanarotti of the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) at MIT. It grew out of an interest in developing a networked version of Forum, the electronic conferencing system on Multics. Multics Forum was originally written by Jay Pattin, J. Spencer Love, and Jeff Schiller, all SIPB members. Stan had also developed a previous conferencing system on VAX/VMS that was named DISCUSS. DISCUSS borrowed many ideas from these older systems.
DISCUSS has received generous support from three departments at MIT: the Laboratory for Computer Science, Project Athena, and Information Systems. They allowed the above individuals to spend time on the project, in hopes of a usable system. Other SIPB members have contributed to DISCUSS, notably Robert French and Ted T'so. Andy Oakland of DCNS deserves credit for writing the xdsc client and providing its man page from which parts of this document were written. Lucien W. Van Elsen also deserves credit for writing the dsgrep program.
On Athena, over 32,000 transactions (not even including mail feeds) have been entered in more than 200 DISCUSS meetings. A warm thank you goes out to all users who have made DISCUSS a successful system.