PLATO - Programmed Logic for Automatic Operations
PLATO was crated in the 1960s by Professor Don Bitzer at the Unviersity of Illinois and it had later been further developed by many other university facualty mambers and students. It was designed as a computer training network, it is often seen as an early example of a virtual community.
PLATO was used as a special purpose programming lanuage called TUTOR, it was mainly used to write educational software. It wasnt until 1972 that PLATO was moved from a single classroom use to the mainframe where thousands of users could connect at all different times or all at once. By 1985 there were over a hundred PLATO systems setup across the country. Between the 1960s to the 1980s there were many updated versions of PLATO.
PLATO went onto become many other programs, in ways it was the starting foundation of computer software that lead into others. No one knows where PLATO ends and were the orignial software begins.