Murray Turoff: A Pioneer of Instant Messaging

Long before social networks, instant messengers, web forums, Internet Relay Chat, AOL, Compuserve, and dial-up bulletin board systems, there was EIES – Electronic Information Exchange System, pronounced like the word eyes. 

Developed by Distinguished Professor Emeritus Murray Turoff back in 1976, EIES is considered among the first computer-mediated, multimachine communications and conferencing systems, and a precursor to the widespread interactive communication features available today.

Professor Turoff passed away Sept. 28, 2022. He left an indelible legacy that extends beyond his long tenure at New Jersey Institute of Technology, to affect any human who ever needed an instant response, wanted to share important information expediently, express an opinion immediately or simply make a connection anywhere around the world.

EIES was designed for university communities to share information in scheduled group conferences. It also allowed users to make public posts, send private messages, look up contact information and read news.

EIES was not the first online service – but some of the precursors were also designed by Turoff.

The Emergency Management Information Systems and Reference Index (EMISARI) has a place in history as one of the earliest networked chat systems. Developed in 1971 for crisis management monitoring of economic disruptions and commodity shortages, it was used for a decade and a half by the U.S. government and became key to coordinating policy information for President Richard Nixon’s wage and price control program to fight inflation.

The EMISARI chat function was called the Party Line, and replaced telephone conferences where dozens of frustrated participants could listen but not contribute to meaningful discussions or offer effective responses. The system also listed current participants and alerted the virtual room when someone joined or left the group.

One sees where this is going … or could have.

In 1988, NJIT trademarked the term “virtual classroom” for EIES, but it lapsed when the software development was discontinued for lack of funding in the late 1990s.

Turoff’s research partner for EIES was Starr Roxanne Hiltz, a social scientist with a deep interest in collaborative virtual education, whose role was to study acceptance and impact of the software platform. With Turoff, she published the book The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer in 1978, which became the defining document and standard reference of its time for the field of computer-mediated communication. Hiltz later married Turoff and joined the NJIT faculty in 1985.

An early social experiment in inspiring candid, interactive online dialogue involved Turoff posting something controversial under a pseudonym to provoke further discussion by his students. “This always broke the bottleneck so other students would start to disagree with me,” he said in 2019. “This made things very interesting and actually encouraged the other students to disagree with the teacher!”

Today, algorithms have taken over the ability to invoke honest responses and opinions for whomever cares to comment – or debate – in relative anonymity. But it largely began with Murray Turoff and a bold innovation he developed at NJIT. Turoff’s technical papers on EIES are available for viewing on an archived NJIT website. The NJIT library also has its own archive including a user guide from 1977.

Learn more about the life and work of Murray Turoff:
-Wikipedia - Biography
-NJIT Faculty Website
-ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library – Resource for publications, citations, downloads
-Google Scholar – articles, journals, publications
-MIT Press – Publisher for The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer and Learning Networks
-LivingInternet.com – History of EMISARI
-Computer.org – IEEE Computer Society Digital Library - Murray Turoff: Father of Computer Conferencing
-Mental Floss (50 Things Turning 50 in 2021:  #35 - The First Chat Room) – Included among the 50 most influential parts of popular culture celebrating a 50th anniversary in 2021