The Electronic Information Exchange System (pron. "eyes") was an early online conferencing bulletin board system that allowed real time and asynchronous communication. The system was used to deliver courses, conduct conferencing sessions, and facilitate research. wikipedia 
Murry Turoff wikipedia
Starr Roxanne Hiltz wikipedia
EIES 2 is based upon objects. This allows the evolution of new types as they are needed. The system includes a Smalltalk Interpreter used as the specification language for the interface and for integration work with other computer resources.
In the mid-1980s, a new version called EIES-2 was developed to research the implementation of group communications in distributed environments, as opposed to the centralized timesharing environment used for the first version.
EIES-2 had an object oriented database architecture using over 2 dozen classes and implementing a notion of "activities", which was a standardized interface for implementing nonstandard functionality such as polls or list-gathering. webpage
Primary implementor: Bob Czech
.
I met Bob Czech while consulting to New Jersey based insurance companies. Bob introduced me to graduate students carrying on his work modeling interpersonal decision-making processes.
In EIES 2 Smalltalk objects were automatically persisted making the communication environment one giant object store. We hint at this architecture in federated wiki by making item attributes immediately available to their corresponding plugins.
Bob later moved to California to work with Doug Engelbart at the Bootstrap Institute. I met Doug through Bob and then once later on through the Computer History Museum.