Email has a fascinating real history. EMISARI at OEP in 1971 had synchronous and asynchronous conferencing, it had a written chat sysetm and it had email, it also had notebooks that allowed collaborative writers and also readers who could not write. A manual is on the NJIT library website i gave in my past message. Email existed at that time on the ARPA net and they refused to give me any data on its use. It was apparent they did not want any data to reach congress that showed that email was the single biggest applications on the ARPA net since congress might think that all the money would go for replacing the 10 cent telephone. Scientific Timesharing was the first company that claimed they used email to run their company. Some of us would use a GE timehsaring Basic system to talk to each other between different countries. You could leave a message by creating a program named for who you were sending to and what number the message was and using REMARK statements to contain the message. We could deal with discussions of 3-7 fairly well. Message systems spread because technical people added them and there was no conscious upper management policy or guidelines. At least two major computer companies almost tore out their message system when a diverse group of their best professionals wrote an anti management document countering a policy decision about use of technology in their products that the professional group disagreed with after the decision was made pubic. There was up to six months of investigation in one company before they decided not to pull out the existing message systems. Then some months later in both cases management reversed their original policy and adopted what the professionals wanted in the plans for future products. The Delphi Method book, which Linstone and I did in 1975 had a final chapter on online group communication efforts and the potential for online Delphis in 1975 (it is free on my website http://is.njit.edu/turoff ) In 2011 a special issue of TFSC on Delphi had an article on the evolution of Delphi as part of a special issue on Delphi Linstone, Harold & Turoff, Murray, Delphi: A brief look backward and forward, Technological Forecasting and social Change, (2011), 2010.09.011 (prediction markets is a delphi system but the people doing it never figured that out). We observed that currently the WEB has brought about "the age of participation" (social networks and things like amazon, ebay), however, what is needed is to strive for is an "age of collaboration" which is really what Delphi is about. Currently a group of us have been creating a Delphi system that allows a group of professionals to collaboratively build dynamic scenario models for planning in Emergency Management. But it can be used in any planning situation. Can send anyone interested a recent paper to be published in May. -- *please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com <murray.turoff@gmail.com> do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu> addressDistinguished Professor EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff <http://is.njit.edu/turoff>*