Posted by Anton Abaya.
Engineer on team #419, Rambots, from BC High / UMass Boston and NASA, Mathsoft, Solidworks.
Posted on 2/26/2000 1:59 AM MST
Greetings FIRST Coordinators,
Some of you know me or have hear from me but with the thousands of people you deal with, I doubt any of you may remember me.
We have a CHAT SERVER that has so far been a brand new idea in the world of FIRST. It has created tremendous interest in many teams and many students, teachers, engineers, team leaders, etc. have found it useful and a great tool.
We are more than welcome to pursue and work on its becoming larger next year (or even this year). We currently support multiple chat rooms, live WEB Based chat, and a very small download (33kb, my compliments to the person who wrote the program). All of this is accessible on our server, the Rambots.com web site.
We have also proposed another idea. There is a way, for the server to be added onto any website but still network it straight to one CHAT server. Realistically the Internet has millions of chat servers. We offer to dedicate this server for FIRST use and allow other members to put CHAT server portions on all their webpages, yet still allowing them to automatically interconnect with the single server.
This will ultimately provide more unity among the FIRST community, as well as allowing them to all chat interactively LIVE from thousands of miles apart.
The first day, we got people from MASS, NH, MI, and as far down as TEXAS. We had another successful chat last night with visitors from MASS to Canada to Hawaii! Would you believe it? I couldn’t!
Again, although publicity is always nice. It is not needed. We offer this for free to FIRST and all its members. We would like to keep the unity of the CHAT rather than having scattered chat servers all over the Internet, in effect scattering the FIRST online community as well. We figure it is a great medium to exchange live information between FIRST employees, FIRST Teams, FIRST Students, and further increase the FIRST spirit online as well.
ANTON ABAYA
Team Leader
RAMBOTS #419
UMass Boston / BC High School