PLATO Notes Released 40 Years Ago Today
On August 7, 1973, the first incarnation of Notes was released to the PLATO community. I was 17 years old at the time, and had been developing the Notes software for the past two or three months. It was what we would now call a “message board” or “forum” where people could publicly post messages and others could read and respond – in other words, a many-to-many communications medium.
Since I had never seen an online message board (although a couple of other people were independently tinkering with similar ideas in other places) I had no model to work from, and only a vague notion of what might develop out of it. The concept of an online community did not yet exist.
It was one thing to write a bunch of program code and debug it by writing test messages and responses to myself. It was another thing entirely to experience the social interaction that program enabled as large numbers of people began using it in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
By the end of 1974, PLATO also had real-time group chat (“Talkomatic”), one-to-one chat (“Term-Talk”), email (“Personal Notes” or “P-Notes”) and many multiplayer games, all of the infrastructure to support the world’s first online community. It was arguably the beginning of what we now think of as “social media”.
Mark Zuckerberg would be born ten years later.
Brian Dear has published an excellent 40-year anniversary piece about PLATO Notes at Medium.com.
I didn’t get to Champaign/Urbana until 1979, but immediately started to “Term Talk” with people all over the country. Thanks David.
I suspect many may only remember PLATO during its later incarnation after it went commercial. The University of Illinois deserves all the credit.
“They say in the end, it’s the wink of an eye.”
As I read about Gnotes being released all those years ago – something that still seems new and important to me, and had a huge effect on my life – I can’t help but think of Jackson Browne’s poetic summation of the experiencing of subjective time. I believe that “subjective time” (the amount of time you feel passing) is inversely proportional to the amount of time you have experienced up to the present:
ST = k * dt / t.
Steve Jobs used to always ask if you wanted to change the world. Congratulations, Trucker, you changed the world BIG TIME!!! I think we all miss the glory days. To some of us with a problem forgetting, it always seems like only yesterday. Oh, how I miss those glory days!
godot
Oh, there used to be much fun, subjective time (as one’s mind raced) waiting for baudot to finish the jobs loaded at CERL! Thinking the code through and editing it in one’s head, then keying everything in before the framatter had a chance to catch up was a cool art in itself. The first two 9600 baud modems’ arrival seemed to trumpet that we’d reached the Holy Grail.
HF
I first started playing games on PLATO in 1973. A high school friend came down from the Chicago area to play PLATO games with me, and we’d stay up all night in some university lab playing what would now be considered extremely primitive games. But we loved it!
David Wooley has always been exceptionally smart, creative, innovative, and interested in facilitating connection with others. The older I get, the more I appreciate him. I am proud to join Sherwin Gooch in having had the privilege of growing up beside David in an environment that encouraged his talents!
And the topics beings discussed were so varied that the “sequencer” was soon to follow… so you could prioritize the order in which you read all of the threads you were following. From system-wide to work-related to what would now be social media. I remember that ipr (inter-personal relationships) was a hotbed of inter-terminal angst for years.
I am perpetually amazed at how things have evolved since then. Kudos to David and all the clever folks who worked on PLATO. (I think we’ve evolved a bit since then too!)