OLC: an on-line consulting system
T. J. Coppeto, Betsy Anderson, Dan Geer, G. Winfield Treese · 1989
Helping users learn the intricacies of UNIX1, particularly in a custom environment, is always a challenge. Helping thousands of users in an environment that is distributed both geographically and computationally is especially difficult. Project Athena has developed an “On-Line Consulting” system (OLC) that enables users to ask questions of consultants located “somewhere on the network.” OLC allows a staff on the order of twenty students to handle the questions and problems of over 8000 users on a network of more than 900 workstations. This paper describes the motives and design goals for OLC, its implementation, and some of the results of its three years of operation.