If you're interested in PLATO, stay tuned. I have been working for many years on a book that tells the story of the PLATO system. It's what I am working on full-time at the moment, 7 days a week.<p>Three years ago I put on a 2-day conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the creation of the PLATO system. Videos of all the sessions are available on YouTube at YouTube.com/platohistory.<p>If you want to know more about the book and what it covers, go to <a href="http://friendlyorangeglow.com" rel="nofollow">http://friendlyorangeglow.com</a>
Georgia Tech had a lab of CDC 721 terminals and used PLATO for at least one class. It always felt weirdly futuristic (or Hollywood fake) for a seemingly "dumb" terminal to switch into a graphical touchscreen mode. I wish we'd had some of the more fun stuff running on them, but they were already being overtaken by X-Windows (Sun 3s and Macs with A/UX), Macs, and PCs with a mix of DOS and early Windows.
I coded on Plato in the mid 80's ("Tudor" language). I was paid minimum wage (about $3.25 per hour), and had various tasks maintaining courseware. I was brianb@udel<p>What everyone says is true: with the forms of chat and email that were prevalent, and things like the friday afternoon dogfights, the future of massively connected computing became "obvious". Based on what I saw then, I worked in computer networking after graduating from college, moved to silicon valley, and recently founded my own company building high speed distributed databases.<p>I bought my first computer over Plato: I found a guy in Illinois who had an older Xerox CP/M machine, we agreed to the price over email, I sent him the check and he sent me the machine. This would have been about '83.
An aside on UI: am I the only one who still romanticizes about monochrome yellow/orange/light-blue-green on black line-art interfaces? That second PLATO terminal on the article reminded me of that (kind of like this LCARS screen: <a href="http://lcars.org.uk/lcars_files/LCARS%20MSD_Enterprise%20B.gif" rel="nofollow">http://lcars.org.uk/lcars_files/LCARS%20MSD_Enterprise%20B.g...</a> edit: or this: <a href="http://www.lcarscom.net/all_mini_avis.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.lcarscom.net/all_mini_avis.gif</a>)<p>When I'm on Wikipedia or some tutorial site, I still sometimes imagine myself looking at the same content in a futuristic monochrome view.
You can try out the PLATO system today by getting a signon on <a href="http://cyber1.org/" rel="nofollow">http://cyber1.org/</a><p>Plasma display technology was invented there.
I remember playing on the PLATO system a few times as a single-digit-year-old. My parents were grad students at UIUC.<p>There was a game called ANTWAR. You would be shown an army of enemy ants in a rectangle in a certain number of rows and columms. The trick was to multiply the rows and columns and choose the size your army to be exactly one more ant in number.<p>They don't let kids hang out in datacenters anymore. But kids have more interesting games at home anyway.
As a South African, I'm fascinated to learn that during the 1980s, PLATO was deploying for tertiary-school education, even in discriminated-against (e.g. black, 'coloured') colleges.<p>It's bizarre to think that in the dying days of apartheid there was already some faction of the government seduced by the promise of third-world techno-utopianism.
Freshman year at UofI I enrolled in a Philosophy course, 108 I think. Mostly liberal arts majors, another engineer and I were in the same study session. The philosophy graduate student TA gets us together for our first study session of the year and walks us through the syllabus.<p>TA: This semester, we'll be talking about Aristotle, Descartes and Plato.
Engineer: We'll we be taking our tests on PLATO?
TA: Yes, we will have two midterms and a final and we will cover Plato.
Engineer: No, I mean will we be taking all our tests on the PLATO system.
TA: I don't know what you mean, but yes, you will be tested on Plato.
Engineer: No, I mean.
Me: The TA is talking about the philosopher Plato while Mr. Engineer is talking about an online testing computer called PLATO.
Rest of class, befuddled, me rolling my eyes.
> games such as Avatar and Empire (a star-trek like game), which had both accumulated more than 1.0 million contact hours on the original PLATO system at UIUC<p>I hated these dudes. Play on your own time, I gotta do another CircuitTutor unit.
<p><pre><code> CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the
computer world, but found marketing the system was not as easy as
hoped. PLATO nevertheless built a strong following in certain markets, and
the last production PLATO system did not shut down until 2006,
*coincidentally* just a month after Norris died.
</code></pre>
Emphasis mine. Is that some bitterness I detect? I guess it's a mark in Wikipedia's favor that things like that stand out, but still...
In 1980 there was a PLATO installation at our local University (UWC) in South Africa when I was in high school.<p>It was used by first year students for some tut work and by high school students from the surrounding area for maths courseware.<p>It was an interesting experiment and novelty but I don't think it fundamentally changed how the varsity did or approached it's teaching.
Wouldn't this be the real precursor to the internet instead of the often-hyped arpanet? Is TCP/IP really what makes the internet the internet, or sharing ideas and collaborating with abstractions on an electronic network in general?