Before Microsoft. Apple. The Web. AOL. The Internet. Before pretty much everything, there was PLATO: the first online community. The network that time forgot. The birthplace of social computing: instant messaging, chat rooms, message forums, the world's first online newspaper, interactive fiction, emoticons, animations, virtual goods and virtual economies, a thriving developer community, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers, flat-panel plasma displays, one of the first spell-checking/answer-judging mechanisms, and countless other innovations. This site offers information regarding a book being researched and written about the PLATO system and the user culture that it spawned in the 1970s. For more details, click any of the links at the top.

A book in the works for more than two decades. Based on extensive research, including interviews with hundreds of key individuals who designed, built, managed, sold, and used the PLATO system.