The Internet Before the Internet

Do you remember life before the internet?

I’m 62 years old. I remember life before computers, when a TI-30 calculator was the epitome of technology. I remember the IBM-PC and the excitement of the WYSIWYG interfaces of Apple computers.

And I remember the Internet. And the Internet before the Internet.

Arpanet was considered the Internet before the Internet according to the history of the Internet. I remember sitting at a VAX terminal on Internet Relay Chat. but there was another system that featured chat, group chat, notes, and games. And that was the PLATO system. PLATO was an educational system that put terminals in colleges and universities, and occasional K-12 schools.

The interface was, by today’s standards, primitive. The classic PLATO terminal was a hulking box with an orange on black plasma screen. (The definitive book on PLATO is actually named The Friendly Orange Glow, by Brian Dear.) But the interface was far friendlier than the cryptically driven Arpanet. PLATO’s programmers and designers built an interface that allowed users to congregate in topic clusters (notes files) and communicate (chat). In addition, with very crude graphics, one could game.

This resulted in a fertile social milieu. PLATO people gamed together, chatted in interest groups, flirted online. There was (informally) online dating, and there were catfishers (I personally knew one, perhaps even the first one). I online dated and attended meetups before the cautionary tales. PLATO spawned its own slang, its own nerd culture.

PLATO and its programmers laid the foundation for things we take for granted on the Internet today. Our web browsers descend from the early browsers that were written by PLATO alumni. Dungeon-style online games started with the crude graphics of PLATO.

So I remember the Internet before the Internet, where I was a gamer and chatted in chat rooms, dated online, and wrote poetry in what we would now call forums.