The PLATO connection is the best part of this piece.

PLATO ran its own programming language - TUTOR - which was designed specifically for creating interactive lessons on the system in 1967.

It's one of the earliest examples of a domain-specific language shaped entirely by its platform. The system also had real-time chat, message boards, and multiplayer games running on shared terminals in the early 1970s — a decade before BBSs went mainstream.

Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.