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MacDiscuss

What is MacDiscuss?

MacDiscuss is a Macintosh application which allows you to use Discuss.

Discuss is an electronic conferencing system that was developed for use at Project Athena. Discuss uses the metaphor of a conference with many on-going meetings. A meeting in Discuss is a discussion group with a specific focus. For example, one meeting may be discussion for a specific MIT departmental committee or team (such as the Discuss Development meeting), another meeting might be designed for a special interest group (such as discussing the TV show, Star Trek: The Next Generation). In Discuss, the discussion takes the form of written messages, known as transactions. Transactions are similar to e-mail messages; in fact, in some cases you actually send transactions to the meeting via e-mail.

Each of these meetings is maintained on some machine on the network. MacDiscuss connects you to these Discuss servers via MITnet. Therefore, unlike electronic mail, you read the Discuss transactions from those servers (you don't use your own disk space to store messages). This makes Discuss a useful archiving program for many mailing lists.

For more information about MacDiscuss, you can find the "Guide to Using MacDiscuss" here.

Where do I get MacDiscuss?

Download the current release version from MIT Macintosh Software Downloads