Airfight , a.k.a. Dogfight (flight sim), on PLATO.
"In Dogfight , two players tried to shoot down each other's 'airplane' ”a tiny spot on the screen ”and avoid being shot down. You could control the position of your own airplane using the various keys on the keyboard. (This, of course, was 10 years before joysticks and computer mice became common.) Unfortunately, the person with the fastest connection to the main computer in Illinois usually won that game."
” Guy Consolmagno , SJ
"PLATO also had Airfight, a 3D real-time flight simulator with 3D views of horizon and airport and enemy (icon only). One of the authors was Brand Fortner. These authors went on to found the company that became Microsoft Flight Simulator . I think 1973 is the right year for the existence of Airfight ”it was EARLIER than Empire . I think it's very important to realize that Microsoft Flight Simulator came from PLATO, from the guys who wrote Airfight . I cannot remember the name of the company they founded, but it was really successful for a few years before Microsoft bought it in the mid-1980s."
” Don Gillies
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
The "Hacking Into Computer Systems: A Beginner's Guide" doc reports PLATO gets hacked with the starship Enterprise attacking people on Airfight (who were expecting airplanes!).
D&D is first sold by Arneson and Gary Gygax as typewritten rulesets.
