There's nothing new under the sun....some nostalgia from matt

Back in the day my mother was a sysop of a CDC PLATO system...in 1973 it had all on old school green screen/orange plasma:

touch screen

instant messaging

chat room

screen sharing

bulletin board/news groups

flight simulator

3D multi-player games

and..... wait for it...

freecell

I used to dial up to it at the university on a 300baud modem and play games with uni students.  They would make jokes that would go way over my head, I must have been like like eight years of age or so!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_system 

         

• Plasma display, circa 1964, by Donald Bitzer for PLATO IV
• Touchscreen, circa 1964, by Donald Bitzer for PLATO IV
• Answer Judging Machinery, ?date?, a set of about 25 commands in TUTOR that made it easy to test a student's understanding of a complex concept.
• Show Display Mode, 1975, a graphics application generator for TUTOR software, precursor to Apple's QuickDraw picture language editor.
• Charset Editor, an early precursor to MacPaint for drawing bitmapped pictures stored in downloadable fonts.
• Monitor Mode on PLATO, 1974, used by instructors to help students, precursor of Timbuktu screen-sharing software.
• Pad and a few months later, system-defined Notesfiles, 1973, the first general-purpose computer message board, and precursor to Unix Newsgroups, Digital DECnotes and Lotus Notes.
• Talkomatic, 1974, a 6-person real-time chat room (text-based), precursor to Instant Messaging Conferences.
• Term-Talk, 1973, precursor to instant messaging.
• Gooch Synthetic Woodwind, circa 1972, A music device for the terminal, precursor to sound cards and MIDI.
• Airfight, 1974, a 3-D flight simulator written for PLATO by Brand Fortner; this probably inspired UIUC student Bruce Artwick to start subLOGIC which was acquired and later became Microsoft Flight Simulator.
• Empire, circa 1974, a 30 person multi-player inter-terminal 2-D real-time space simulation.
• Spasim, circa 1974, a 32-player first-person 3D space battle game
• Pedit5, circa 1974, likely the first graphical dungeon computer game.
• dnd, 1974–1975, a dungeon crawl game that included the first video game boss.
• Panther, circa 1975 by John Haefeli, a 3-D tank simulation and forerunner of Atari's Battlezone game.
• Build-Up, 1975 by Bruce Wallace, based on a story by J. G. Ballard, the first PLATO 3-D walkthru maze game. The maze itself was also 3-D, having holes in the floor and ceiling.
• Think15, circa 1977, 2-D outdoor wilderness quest simulation, like Trek with monsters, trees, treasures.
• Avatar, circa 1978, a 2.5-D graphical Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), a precursor to EverQuest.
• Freecell, 1979 by Paul Alfille, which probably spawned the Windows version.
• Mahjong solitaire, 1981 by Brodie Lockard, popularised in 1986 by Activision as Shanghai.
• Emoticons, by 1973