CIX - Technical Information

Technical Information

CIX Conferencing is based on the CoSy Conferencing System, though it has been heavily modified by generations of staff to add new features. The CoSy conferencing system used by CIX was initially run on a UNIX server. (This was initially the same CoSy code-base on which BIX the US-centric Byte Information eXchange was based.)

At first, users read the text-based (ISO 8859-1) CIX messages online, but the UK's practice of charging per minute for telephone calls led to the development of off-line readers (OLRs). The first CIX OLR was TelePathy (DOS-based), which developed into the first WIndows OLR - WIgWam (now an open-source project, under the name Virtual Access). The official Windows OLR for CIX is called Ameol, from A Most Excellent Off-Line reader. This handles email, CIX conferencing and Usenet, and is freely available. It was written independently by Steve Palmer in 1994, and more than a decade later, it is still the most popular way of accessing CIX. Many other OLRs, written by CIX users, are also available for other operating systems, such as Nicola on the Amiga, and Polar for Psion PDAs. Augur is an Open Source OLR designed for CIX.

In 1996, it was decided to port the system to Sun hardware, and upgrade the bank of modems. ISDN dial up access, and ability to use the Internet to blink (a term used to collect messages) were also introduced.