NOTES

From CarlWiki

NOTES was the predecessor to Caucus, used on the VAX system Veblen (and Veblen's predecessors, Tirith and Morgul). It was itself the successor to a previous conferencing system known as FORUM.

NOTES was arranged much as Caucus is now, with discrete conferences that were created by faculty, staff, or students. The administrator of a conference could set permissions in such a way as to restrict membership to certain students or classes of students. It was run via a command-line interface (for example, to open the conference REC-SF-TREK, one would type "open rec-sf-trek").

Besides the difference between being web-based and being VMS based, the major difference between NOTES and Caucus was that NOTES showed only one post per screen, whereas Caucus shows all entries in a particular topic (up to the user-defined limit) on the same screen. Upon opening a particular conference, users would page through new topics and responses mostly using the enter key.

Several conferences currently on Caucus, notably Review and Cobwebs, began their life as NOTES conferences. The simliarity in layout between the two systems facilitated the transfer of data from the old to the new system, and was a factor in the selection of Caucus as the next online discussion forum.