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PLATO: An educational computer system from the '60s shaped the future (2023)

Forums, instant messaging, and multiplayer video games all started here.

Gone was the old cathode-ray storage tube; instead, PLATO IV's most notable change and enduring feature was a bright orange 512×512 bitmapped gas plasma display first developed in 1964 by Bitzer, electrical engineering professor Gene Slottow, and graduate student Robert Willson. Some were honorable (re-training unemployed workers for new fields; various courses for inner-city schools), and some were unusual (a farmer crop information system, an Ojibwe Native American language trainer), but despite heavy marketing campaigns, none were highly profitable, even among the large government and corporate customers willing to buy. In addition, the creativity of its users and its early freewheeling environment combined to yield groundbreaking academic content, highly influential games, and pioneering social and messaging tools that were the conceptual forerunners of the applications we use now and set in motion the cultural underpinnings of our ubiquitously networked modern world.

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