Here we explore the history of early collaborative software. There have been a lot of experiments, and in many ways the advent of the world wide web, and the development of the advertising model led commercialisation, while spreading the benefits of the internet to billions of people around the world, has limited the scope of these early more collaborative experiments - wikipedia 
Douglas Engelbart first envisioned collaborative computing in 1951 and documented his vision in 1962, with NLS (computer system) in full operational use by his research team by the mid-1960s, and held the first public demonstration of his work in 1968 in what is now referred to as "The Mother of All Demos."
The following year, Engelbart's lab was hooked into the ARPANET, the first computer network, enabling them to extend services to a broader userbase.
- Intelligence amplification - Arpanet - Doug Engelbart Archive Collection - MUD
Online collaborative gaming software began between early networked computer users. In 1975, Will Crowther created Colossal Cave Adventure on a DEC PDP-10 computer. As internet connections grew, so did the numbers of users and multi-user games. In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at University of Essex in the United Kingdom, created the game MUD (Multi-User Dungeon).
The US Government began using truly collaborative applications in the early 1990s. One of the first robust applications was the Navy's Common Operational Modeling, Planning and Simulation Strategy (COMPASS). The COMPASS system allowed up to 6 users to create point-to-point connections with one another; the collaborative session only remained while at least one user stayed active, and would have to be recreated if all six logged out.
MITRE improved on that model by hosting the collaborative session on a server that each user logged into. Called the Collaborative Virtual Workstation (CVW), this allowed the session to be set up in a virtual file cabinet and virtual rooms, and left as a persistent session that could be joined later.
In 1996, Pavel Curtis, who had built MUDs at PARC (company), created PlaceWare, a server that simulated a one-to-many auditorium, with side chat between "seat-mates", and the ability to invite a limited number of audience members to speak. In 1997, engineers at GTE used the PlaceWare engine in a commercial version of MITRE's CVW, calling it InfoWorkSpace (IWS). In 1998, IWS was chosen as the military standard for the standardized Air Operations Center. The IWS product was sold to General Dynamics and then later to Ezenia.
# Tools
Search for free culture images for this page on google
POST https://rest.livecode.world/imagine