Wikipedia
ATHEMOO was a MOO which was created in 1995 at the University of Hawaii as an online performance and teaching space, for a professionals and academics who were interested in theatre. A MOO is an online text based reality which is used for socialising or game playing. They are user driven with many people coming together to create new worlds out of text.
ATHEMOO was developed in conjunction with the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and was designed originally under the auspices of providing a discussion space for people who were unable to attend conferences on the issues of performance theatre in the United States of America. Originally ATHEMOO was designed so that all of the online open areas looked like a Hotel Lobby. At the time of ATHEMOO's establishment there were over 2200 members of ATHE, half of which were earning under $20,000 a year; it was therefore decided at the ATHE conference in 1993 that ATHEMOO would be created to help all members discuss and learn from the ATHE conferences.
Although ATHEMOO was originally conceived as a discussion space the creator realised its potential as a performative arena for the use and proliferation of online interactive performance. Audience members and any participants in a performance would be invited to visit the website at a time when the performance starts. Once the performance has started the actors playing a role within the performance space in ATHEMOO exist both within the virtual and physical world, thus creating two simultaneous performances. In some cases actors would meet in the physical world to rehearse work they would be performing in ATHEMOO.