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Here's the link to PLATO's use of emoticons in the 1970s
http://www.platopeople.com/emoticons.html

If problems with pasting, maybe a link would do. And this one seems to cover the first use of plain chars smiley, in 1982. Tho in other system there were tricks to overlay chars and create single "cell" smileys, in the 70s. I also found a huge list of smileys.

This has been going on for literally decades. Lots of old "time sharing" systems would add custom MOTDs for holidays. The University of Illinois Plato System used to customize the "clock page" on the login display (512x512 plasma display terminals back in the '70s!). It got turned into a pumpkin on Halloween, a Christmas tree on christmas, a turkey on ThanksGiving http://www.platopeople.com/whatsnew.html/ midway down the page is an example image from 1973.

.... in their faces.

Founding of Microsoft : 1975

First documented use of smileys on electronic systems : 1972 or even earlier.

http://www.platopeople.com/emoticons.html

I also thought that Moria wasn't created until the late 70s, and there there were more traditional nethack-like games before then. I used MinnA instead of Cerl, so maybe it just took a long time to make it over there.

Plato was a really cool system. Back in the 70s and 80s, it was more like the modern Internet than the Internet was back then.

A good overview of Plato can be found at www.platopeople.com There is also a group of people trying to preserve the original plato system.

• http://cyber1.org/
• http://www.platopeople.com/
• http://www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm

http://www.platopeople.com/about.html was started in 1960 - surely it's got to be a candidate for being the very first online community of any kind.

Unless, of course, anyone knows different...

People who started using computers after the PC revolution have no idea about the miserable user experience that centralised computers imposed.

Check out Plato. Pre-1975 bitmapped graphics, audio and photographic quality images, instant messaging, near zero latency multiplayer network gaming, distance learning, groupware, newsgroups, online newspapers, animated email, network delivery of music, client/server computing, touch screen interfaces, flat-panel displays, and multimedia that were delivered across a worldwide educational network with satellite and cable communications using CDC mainframes.

The PLATO III system circa 1965 had a TALK program that enabled users to talk across the system between different terminals. And of course, this evolved into TERM-Talk in PLATO IV in 1973, after the Talk-O-Matic program gained popularity (as the first multichannel chat room).

For more on this, see http://www.platopeople.com/termtalk.html

I remember using CDC's PLATO system in the mid-seventies. It didn't succeed in the marketplace, but in it's day Plato blazed trails: global networking, real-time multiplayer games, email ... and instant messaging where both parties see both lines of text in real time.

It should look nice and have a cool GUI. Blech. I hate the interfaces in most IM clients. They look like crap. ICQ has too many useless features to navigate through, Yahoo looks even uglier than a GTK program, and... well... let's not even touch AIM or MSN, which actually have ADS embedded in the client! Argh. Talk about user hostile!

So what IM are you using? This?

Here's a page with more information as well as an actual screen shot of the 12/19/73 announcement:

http://www.platopeople.com/termtalk.html

Right. Here are the PLATO smileys and emoticons:

www.platopeople.com/emoticons.html

Long before USENET there was PLATO. PLATO had emoticons galore, much richer than the ASCII ones that came later.

On PLATO, one created emoticons by taking advantage of the SHIFT-space capability. Whenever you pressed SHIFT-space, the cursor moved back exactly one space. You could then type over the previous character. Combinations of certain characters led to all kinds of faces, smileys, beer glasses, you name it.

To see some of these examples, go to www.platopeople.com/emoticons.html.

- Brian Dear
Working on a book on the history of PLATO

There is a bit of information out there about some things that started on PLATO that are now pretty much familiar to everyone. IMB/Lotus credit PLATO's "notes" as being an inspiration for Notes/Domino. There is a nice summary of innovations on the system including personal notes (email), multiplayer games, and most importantly "online community," by David Wooley. Brian Dear is also writing a book on PLATO people that also has some good history.

Learning about PLATO makes a nice history lesson for both online gaming fans as well as people working in online education.

It is not often I can sign a note as chris/mfl and an Orion Captain

However, what should be remembered is that Notes is a database and workflow application. It is not an Emailer or even a PIM.

But Notes is scriptable and has nice repository features (UID-based replication; hierarchical storage, etc.) and has very nice access management. So workflow is an obvious application. But so are other apps that involve sharing masses of text. Which is why there's now support for HTTP, POP, IMAP, LDAP, and god knows what else.

So of course IBM has ported Notes to Linux. But not the whole thing. The Notes server, which has become a separate product known as Domino, is available on Linux and every other platform IBM is into. IBM used to push the Notes client as a general-purpose message app, but it's so weird and kludgy that it really has not hope of a following except among Notes true believers.

The thing that bothers me about Notes is that it's sold as a workflow solution. What it really is is a platform on which workflow solutions can be built -- with a lot of development and integration effort!