AUTHOR MODE · press NEXT to begin · lesson: scenius/plato
Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations — the community
The pioneering networked learning system where online forums, messaging, and multiplayer games were quietly invented — a decade early.
PLATO, built at the University of Illinois from 1960 under Don Bitzer, was a pioneering computer-based education system that quietly invented much of online social life a decade or more early.
To teach, its engineers created plasma touch-screens; its user community created the rest — online message forums (PLATO Notes, ancestor of the newsgroup), instant messaging, screen-sharing, emoticons, and some of the first multiplayer graphical games. A generation of students effectively lived online inside PLATO before the wider world had a name for it. Its community and conventions fed directly into later online cultures — the WELL, bulletin-board systems, multiplayer gaming — making PLATO a crucial, underremembered ancestor of the networked world.
Computers should connect people for learning and play through shared real-time terminals — and users themselves should build the community's tools.
Invented, years early, the online forum, instant messaging, emoticons, multiplayer games, and screen-sharing — the social template later reinvented by the WELL and the web.
A mainframe community that discovered online social life before there was an internet to hold it.
Eclipsed by personal computers and networks; its veterans and ideas seeded the games industry, online community, and ed-tech.