~~~
"If you were involved with PLATO in any way, during the 60s, 70s, or 80s -- either as a courseware developer, an educator or faculty member, an engineer or system administrator, a student, a game player, whatever -- I would like to hear from you.
This book is the story of the people that were a part of that online community -- the first real online "virtual community", pre-Web, pre-AOL, pre-USENET, pre-BBS, pre-everything.
Were you a PLATO person? If yes, please help me make this book the most accurate and detailed account of the PLATO story as can be done.
This is your chance to help contribute to the oral history of PLATO."
~~~
He also has a page about PLATO emoticons which is fascinating:
"13 September 2002 -- The news is floating around the Web right now about the "discovery" of the first smiley. What readers and reporters are apparently not aware of is that the smiley being discussed is the first ASCII smiley.
Like so many things, PLATO was doing smileys years earlier. In fact, smileys on PLATO were already an art form by 1976. PLATO users began doing smiley characters probably as early as 1972 (when PLATO IV came out), but possibly even earlier on PLATO III (still to be determined... old-timer PLATO III users please speak up!).
How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space -- and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more -- in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters. So if you typed "W" then SHIFT-space then "O" then SHIFT-space then "B", "T", "A", "X", all with SHIFT-spaces in between, all those characters would plot on top of each other, and the result would be the smiley as shown above in the "WOBTAX" example.
UNQUOTE
Thanks V. of TYR for passing this along to Al.
I remember that before computers there were people using typewriter special characters in various shapes to make art that preceded ASCII art, and there were also people who shared decks of punched cards that drew Christmas Art. No matter what the technology, there is a mentality out there that will figure out how to make it create beautiful stuff, blowing the minds of the ordinary users.
11:10:31 AM 
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