Currently in my pile of books that I naively think I'll read one day, but we both know will likely never happen, is The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear. It is a history of Xerox's PLATO system, "home of not only computer-based education but, surprisingly, the first online community, and the original incubator for social computing: instant messaging, chat rooms, message forums, the world's first online newspaper, interactive fiction, emoticons, animations, virtual goods and virtual economies, a thriving developer community, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers". That's right, all that stuff was basically invented by the folk at Xerox PARC over 50 years ago. The author's blog is a fun scroll-through if you don't wanna read the book.
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