SIGMA-An interactive message service for the Military Message Experiment

The increasing sophistication of military systems and decreasing time frame for making decisions make it essential to provide the military commander better quality information faster. With today's technology, messages can traverse several thousand miles in fractions of a second, but hours are lost at either end, both in entering the message into the communications system and in delivering it to the person who can act on it. Even after the message is delivered, an officer acting on it requires background information to formulate a proper response. More often than not, that information is available only after time-consuming searching through ponderous files. The response is usually an outgoing message which must be coordinated with other people, many of whom are not in the immediate vicinity of the message drafter. Hand-carrying the draft to these people slows the response still further. In times of crisis this system can easily become overloaded, throwing the entire operation into disarray. This message management problem seems an excellent candidate for automation. Users of the ARPAnet have had a form of on-line message service for more than seven years. There is no question that the technology exists, but whether it will be cost-effective in the military environment is not so clear. In December 1975 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Commander Naval Telecommunications Command (NAVTELCOM), Commander Naval Electronic Systems Command (N A VELEX), and Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC) signed a Memorandum of Agreement6 stating their intention to conduct an experiment at CINCPAC Headquarters whose express goal was to "evaluate the utility of interactive message service capabilities in a military environment." The experiment is called the Military Message Experiment (MME). To have the military conduct an experiment of this sort is highly unusual. More traditionally the user community