Online World Timeline
Posted on December 19, 2001 @ 08:48 in Research
1973 Talk-O-Matic, a proto-IRC with handles and chat rooms, is on PLATO at this point (it may have existed earlier).
"One of the more popular activities was "Talk-O-Matic". Five people at a time could write messages, and read each other's messages, on the same screen. Today, Internet chat rooms work on the same principle. One of the remarkable new features of this page was that you could log in with an invented name, and pretend you were anyone you wanted -- any name, any age, any gender. One favorite trick was to log in using the name of someone else already logged into the page, simply to confuse everyone else." - Guy Consolmagno, SJ.
This little snippet of info comes from Raph Koster's Online World Timeline. (Thanks Lisbeth for the link on your MOO page.)
It's great to see these kind of early references to playing with online representation. I'm interested in stuff like performance, authenticity, impersonation, gender-bending as ways of constructing realities, even if they're virtual realities. Seeing that early on the 'computer' and the computer network were playful and evocative spaces is telling me that this is an integral part of using computer/network technology. If you read the rest of the timeline, it's amazing to see how much time was spend in the early days of computing on playing and writing the games one could play.
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