This section will show various design studies I have done as part of preliminary project planning and evaluation. I'll give background information first, and link to the design study. In the study proper, I'll add comments for clarification or later reconsideration.
Background:
Back in the communications dark ages, Ma Bell was still a Monopoly and a 1200 bps modem cost $500. Bulletin boards with 10 MB of storage and two lines were typical and my long distance sometimes cost more than my food.
Back then, in March of 1985, I was invited to join an experimental conferencing named BIX (Byte Information Exchange). I signed up on the Ides of March, rapidly became a moderator and spent many hours online. In 1991 I was promoted to Exchange Editor (EE) for the Programmers Exchange. The Internet and other outside forces stressed the group, but things went well until 1996, when a power struggle arose. BIX went on until 2001 but never recovered from the 1996 problems.
This is not the place to talk about what happened to the BIX community, though much remains to be said about the forces that led to its demise. In the fall of 2000, a small group of Bixen were discussing how to build a better conferencing system as a survival strategy for the BIX community. I undertook a design study named RCCS for Real Community Conferencing System.
RCCS was based on what I had seen as a moderator and EE, and was designed to deal with some of the causes of BIX's demise. It was also designed for hardware efficiency, something that gets little attention these days. The critics lambasted the hardware orientation and failed to comment on any other aspects, missing my purpose completely.