Doug Engelbart first envisioned collaborative computing in 1951 Doug Engelbart - Father of Groupware, documented his vision in 1962,^[5] with working prototypes in full operational use by his research team by the mid 1960s,^[6] and held the first public demonstration of his work in 1968 in what is now referred to as "The Mother of All Demos.".^[7] The following year, Engelbart's lab was hooked into the ARPANET, the first computer network, enabling them to extend services to a broader userbase. See also Intelligence Amplification Section 4: Douglas Engelbart, ARPANET Section on ARPANET Deployed, and the Doug Engelbart Archive Collection.

Online collaborative gaming software began between early networked computer users. In 1975 by 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 Essex University in the UK, created the game MUD (Multi-User Dungeon). A number of other MUDs were created, but remained a computer science novelty until the late 1980s, when personal computers with dial-up modems began to be more common in homes, largely through the use of multi-line Bulletin Board Systems and online service providers.

Parallel to development of MUDs were applications for online chat, video sharing and voice over IP. These would be essential for further development. Studies at MITRE showed the value of voice and text chat, and sharing pictures for shared understanding.

The US Government began using truly collaborative applications in the early 1990s.^[8] One of the first robust applications was the Navy's Common Operational Modeling, Planning and Simulation Strategy (COMPASS).^[9] The COMPASS system allowed up to 6 users created 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.^[10] In 1996, Pavel Curtis, who had built MUDs at PARC, 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.^[11] The IWS product was sold to General Dynamics and then later to Ezenia.^[12]