Interface Issues in Computer Support for Asynchronous Communication JAMES H. MORRIS1, CHRISTINE M. NEUWIRTH1, SUSAN HARKNESS REGLI1, RAVINDER CHANDHOK2 and GEOFFREY C. WENGER2 1 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; 2Within Technologies, Greensburg, PA {jhm, cmn, shr1}@cmu.edu; {chandhok, wenger}@within.com Introduction To everyone's surprise, the most popular and extensively used feature of the Arpanet, begun in 1969 with funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was asynchronous communication [5]. Once the technology was available, people used it to exchange messages on a wide range of topics and to carry out work that used to be conducted with face-to-face meetings. Whereas the Arpanet was confined to a relatively small number of people at research universities and in government, similar trends are being observed in Internet usage [4]. People use network technologies to (try to) overcome time and space constraints. Of course, people communicated asynchronously long before computers. Compared to letter-writing, the medium has some obvious advantages speed, automatic filing, ease of duplication and distribution and disadvantages as well as e-mail spamming has demonstrated. On the whole, any type of asynchronous communication will differ greatly from face-to-face communication. When people are dispersed in space and time, numerous aspects of communication are affected,
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/interface-issues-in-computer-support-for-asynchronous-communication-gb51zJQ0qK