Vismon

Vismon was the Bell Labs system which displayed authors' faces on one of their internal e-mail systems. The name was a pun on the sysmon program used at Bell to show the load on computer systems. It can also be interpreted as "visual monitor". The system inspired Rich Burridge to develop the similar but more widespread faces system which spread with Unix distributions in the 1980s. This in turn inspired Steve Kinzler to develop the Picons, or personal icons, which have the goal of offering symbols and other images, as well as faces to represent individuals and institutions in email messages. Other systems such as the faces available on the LAN email functions of the Nextstep platform also seem to have been influenced by the original Vismon capabilities. The faces program in Plan 9 is the direct descendant of this system.