Xerox PARC stole everything they could from PLATO after their 1972 tour of PLATO and being PhDs never gave credit where credit was due! Picture language, app generator, multilingual fonts, a system so simple even a kid could learn to program it (I did at age 14, self taught), bitmap graphics, etc. When I went to work at Xerox Office Systems Division - the development arm of PARC - I would say that after 13 years of trying - with computers 10x faster - they were PARTIALLY caught up! Highly inferior communications tools, and no support for inter-terminal games . .

Computer History Museum DON BITZER 2022 Fellow https://computerhistory.org/profile/don-bitzer/

For pioneering online education and communities with PLATO and coinventing the plasma display

When networks like the Internet were still a research lab curiosity, Don Bitzer's multiuser PLATO system served as a dress rehearsal for what we do on those networks today – learn, teach, collaborate, chat, mail, play games, argue, and more. PLATO's courseware language and touchscreen, multimedia terminals previewed features of decades hence. PLATO was a postcard from the future of online communities, and its example would help make that future real.

Donald L. Bitzer was born January 1, 1934 and is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is co-inventor of the flat-panel plasma display and the "father of PLATO,” the world’s earliest time-shared, computer-based education system and home to one of the world’s most pioneering online communities.

History doesn't quite work as nicely as one might like. Fact is, dozens, probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of PLATO people wound up working in the tech industry, had long careers there at DEC, Data General, Sun Microsystems, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc etc etc etc.

The last section of my book documents some of the influences, including the most obvious one, Ray Ozzie's Iris project which created Lotus Notes, named after PLATO Notes. Lotus Notes had like 100 million users and was sold to IBM for billions of dollars. It had a huge influence on the corporate IT world.

And AuthorWare was developed by PLATO people, and got merged with Macromind, creating MacroMedia, which was ultimately gobbled up for billions by Adobe.

There's a lot of influence, but there's 100000x more noise and other stuff since, so it's buried and therefore the normal conclusion is "oh, there's no evidence so there was no impact" but that's too easy to dismiss... there's lots of impact, and PLATO people went everywhere, including me, doing a bunch of startups all of which were influenced by PLATO in one or more ways