The Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) is a computerized conferencing system built by the Computerized Conferencing and Communications Center at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark) under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. It is designed as a test facility to support information exchange among small groups of research scientists and engineers. The system is first described in terms of the hardware, the functional characteristics, and the user protocols. Then these characteristics are reviewed from the standpoint of human communications.