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By DAVID J. HILL

Published: October 10, 2011

Take a deep breath and imagine a world without—gasp!—Facebook.

Perhaps that’s the boring, introverted society we might be living in had there not been a progression of technologies that led to the development of Mark Zuckerberg’s social media behemoth. Would you believe that some 25 years ago, something as simple as a list service was a critical forerunner to the social media movement, and that UB was at the forefront of it?

Well, it was, and so was UB.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of LISTSERV, the software that, as ancient now as it may seem, served as something of a precursor to social media. It was the first software application used for electronic mailing lists. A list service distributes a single email to lists of participants, including replies and forwards, and manages the administrative task of maintaining the email address lists.

UB was among the early adopters of BITNET, a cooperative among U.S. universities that used email and the LISTSERV software as a means for discussing academic topics.

“It was the forerunner of today’s social media in terms of the progression of information technology,” says Rick Lesniak, UB IT policy and communications officer. Lesniak, who also holds an appointment as an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Communication, College of Arts and Sciences, wrote UB’s application to join BITNET in 1985.

Eric Thomas, a student in Paris, France, developed the LISTSERV software that forged a revolution in email list management, explains Lesniak, who was among a group of UB tech staff who began working with Thomas in 1986 on a “peering model” that solved the issue of the slow transmittal of data to email list databases.

At that time, email lists were used primarily as an avenue for academics, particularly those with an interest in computers, to connect and share ideas. LISTSERV’s application today is vastly different. Now, the software is used to apprise specific groups within the UB community of important news and/or events.

For example, every Monday morning, UB faculty and staff fire up their email programs and find a message titled “This Week @ UB.” It’s sent to a database of email addresses of all university employees. Smaller groups within UB also maintain their own database; the Professional Staff Senate, for example. The LISTSERV software is now managed by a company called L-Soft.

Prior to Thomas’ development of LISTSERV, email databases were handled manually, meaning that if an organization wanted to be added to or removed from a list, a representative would have to contact the human list manager. It was a tedious, time-consuming process. It became more tedious once people began to realize the potential of such lists.

“People started to understand that these lists could be handy for something other than talking about computers,” says Lesniak. “People were starting to form these new types of communities. Everybody saw that there was a real advantage here.”

But it also was very slow. Email messages to lists were sent from one link of the BITNET network to the next until finally reaching their destination. The connection speed enabled the transmittal of just 1,000 characters per second. “Your standard 4G LTE cell phone processes 1.2 million characters per second,” Lesniak notes.

Around the time Thomas developed LISTSERV, UB acquired an IBM mainframe known as UBVM; the VM stood for virtual machine. It was massive, occupying a space roughly the size of the Starbucks in The Commons on the North Campus. James Gerland, who retired as UB’s director of Informatics Computing Services, met Thomas at a virtual machine conference, where he told him that UB was working on a peering model. UB staff began working with Thomas soon after.

“We were one of the early adopters of BITNET. UB got a big mainframe computer for academic work. It was natural for us to reach out to Eric at this point, and UB became one of the first schools to work with Eric on this peering model,” says Lesniak.

The peering model allowed UB to serve as a host site for email list traffic destined for the U.S. “We were the No. 2 volume site for doing this kind of work,” Lesniak says. “UB’s reputation on the Pacific rim grew tremendously at this time because we were housing all these sites.”

The university now hosts only UB-related lists.

Today, LISTSERV software is practically taken for granted, although it remains viable. And to think, many of today’s social media sites can trace their ancestry back to something as simple as LISTSERV.

“We wouldn’t have Facebook today if somebody didn’t create a LISTSERV back then,” Lesniak says.