LISTSERV

LISTSERV is a commercial mailing-list manager that allows anyone on the Internet to set up an email discussion forum to which similarly interested people can subscribe. The software, initially distributed for free, is perhaps the most important remnant of the old BITNET (“Because It's There Network”), an early online network that was prevalent in the early 1980s, before the advent of today's Internet.

The email service, originally developed for BITNET mailing networks, works when a LISTSERV participant sends an email message to a server containing the correct software, which automatically forwards that message to the email addresses of all other list subscribers. The system was a tremendous boon to advancing online discussion forums, rendering unnecessary such onerous tasks as keeping track of all the email addresses of list participants, and carbon-copying any messages intended for the group to each recipient. When the Internet became the de facto standard for online networking in the early 1990s, BITNET fell by the wayside. Nevertheless, many thousands of LISTSERV email lists continue to thrive online.

Eric Thomas, a computer science student at France's Ecole Central de Paris, developed LISTSERV in 1986, at a time when BITNET had grown so crowded with new computer users that managing the lists of email addresses by hand had become extremely cumbersome. In a May 2001 interview with the http://ChannelSeven.com Web site, Thomas said that he came up with the idea for what he initially called “Revised Listserv” after judging it “silly” that people were attempting to manage such a repetitive and error-prone process manually, when a computer could obviously do it better and more efficiently.

More importantly, Thomas said, existing manual email lists were generating thousands of messages every day, many of which traveled overseas on saturated telephone lines over 9,600 bps (baud per second) modem connections. “Every time someone posted a message, hundreds of copies of the message added to the thousands of messages that were already waiting to cross the Atlantic,” Thomas said. “In fact, the traffic from the mailing lists alone was threatening to make private email totally unusable, with delivery delays approaching a week.”

Realizing that no one else had considered writing an automated mailing-list management program, Thomas wrote one himself. He set a distributed-computing model for the system, allowing several machines, particularly servers separated by the Atlantic Ocean, to share the email traffic load and to better manage its flow. Revised Listserv, later shortened and capitalized as LISTSERV, was distributed free to BITNET members in July 1986; this was the first time that a software program had ever managed a mailing list. With LISTSERV in place, a single email post was automatically distributed to an entire discussion list, vastly simplifying the use of email forums by subscribing group members. The system was soon improved to allow the creation of LISTSERV databases for each mailing list, resulting in searchable online archives of discussion threads.

In 1994, Thomas formed L-Soft International Inc., based jointly in Landover, Maryland, and Stockholm, Sweden, where Thomas resides. The company now markets LISTSERV as a commercial product. Initially, the software ran only on IBM mainframes that ran the VM operating system, but Thomas has since reconfigured the software to allow it to run on Unix, OpenVMS, Microsoft Windows, and Windows 95/98 operating systems. Of course, it can also run on the Internet, now that BITNET has disappeared.

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