Online Community
Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, many consider its most enduring legacy was to be the online community spawned by its communication features. PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley in 1973, was among the world's first online message boards, and years later became the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes. By 1976, PLATO had sprouted a variety of novel tools for online communication, including Personal Notes (e-mail), Talkomatic (chat rooms), Term-Talk (instant messaging), monitor mode (remote screen sharing) and emoticons.
PLATO's plasma panels were well suited to gaming, although its I/O bandwidth (180 characters per second or 60 graphic lines per second) was relatively slow. By virtue of 1500 shared 60-bit variables per game (initially), it was possible to implement online games. Because it was an educational computer system, most of the user community was keenly interested in gaming.
Many popular multiplayer online games were developed on PLATO during the 1970s and 1980s, such as Empire (a multiplayer game based on Star Trek), Airfight (a precursor to Microsoft Flight Simulator), Panther (a vector graphics based tankwar game, earlier than, but similar in many respects to Atari's BattleZone), the original Freecell, and several games inspired by the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, including dnd and Rogue. Moria, Dry Gulch (a western-style variation), and Bugs-n-Drugs (a medical variation) — these all presaged MUDs (Multi-User Domain) and MOOs (MUD, Object Oriented) as well as popular first-person shooters like Doom and Quake and MMORPGs (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) like Everquest and World of Warcraft. Avatar, PLATO's most popular game, is one of the world's first MUDs and has over 1 million hours of use.
These communication tools and games formed the basis for an online community of thousands of PLATO users, which lasted for well over twenty years. PLATO's games became so popular that a program called "The Enforcer" was written to run as a background process to regulate or disable game play at most sites and times – a precursor to parental-style control systems that regulate access based on content rather than security considerations.
In September 2006 the Federal Aviation Administration retired its PLATO system, the last system that ran the PLATO software system on a CDC Cyber mainframe, from active duty. Existing PLATO-like systems now include NovaNET and Cyber1.org.
By early 1976, the original PLATO IV system had 950 terminals giving access to more than 3500 contact hours of courseware, and additional systems were in operation at CDC and Florida State University. Eventually, over 12,000 contact hours of courseware was developed, much of it developed by university faculty for higher education. PLATO courseware covers a full range of high-school and college courses, as well as topics such as reading skills, family planning, Lamaze training and home budgeting. In addition, authors at the University of Illinois School of Basic Medical Sciences (now, the College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign) devised a large number of basic science lessons and a self-testing system for first year students. However the most popular "courseware" remained their multi-user games and role-playing video games such as dnd, although it appears CDC was uninterested in this market. As the value of a CDC-based solution disappeared in the 1980s, interested educators ported the engine first to the IBM PC, and later to web-based systems.
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