If you're looking for a longer PLATO read, check out Brian Dear's definitive book: The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System https://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Orange-Glow-Untold-Cybercult...
While U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan marveled in 2014 that his kids could learn to code online using Khan Academy, a 1975 paper on Interactive Systems for Education notes that 650 students were learning programming online using PLATO during the Spring '75 semester http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED102940.pdf
Khan Academy (2013) v. PLATO (1973) https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7307/11141723746_d2b239bd18_o...
I still remember the awesome multiplayer fighter jet combat game!
Brand Fortner's Airfight - it inspired Sublogic Inc. who wrote Microsoft flight simulator 2023.
The first version of airtight was developed by myself and Kevin Gorey. I was the sole author of later versions.
yo, Brand! nice to see you here!!!
One of my earliest memories of a computer was around 1979, when a kind teacher took me to see a PLATO terminal at my elementary school. I remember being shown I could play the game Concentration with another person somewhere else in the world, the magic of networking. It made a huge impression on me.
My mom was a PLATO developer. She wrote computer based learning courses for it.
What I remember about PLATO was the games. I think there was one where you could drop a flower pot on Mickey Mouse's head. Does that sound familiar to anyone?
Wow that's so cool!
My Mom certainly was not a developer, but she was studying nursing at little Bay Du Noc college in the upper peninsula of Michigan and AMAZINGLY there was a computer lab there with those orange round plastic machines and it was completely empty save for one guy that gave me an account and allowed me to chat with someone in California via a dungeon game. I must have been about 11 or 12. Looking back I wish I'd spent more hours in that lab.
My first time using the modern Internet was at a computer lab at the University of Delaware. I was 11 years old and I used it to look up tips for playing Mortal Combat.
My PLATO usage also occurred at UD labs. I was even part of a photo shoot for a kid's PLATO summer camp. (I didn't get to attend the camp)
Did she write it in Esperanto? I have a vague memory of cartoon characters doing things you typed in. But the developers thought Esperanto was easier to parse, so they made humans learn it to talk to the computer. Jen kial mi lernis esperanton.
I was maybe 6 years old at the time. I don't recall what she coded in.
UIUC grad here. Used PLATO in 89 for a Physics E&M class. I had friends fail out due to Empire and Avatar guild reset.
In the works of the quiz answer parser:
no
I was at UIUC in 1988. My first physics class used PLATO quite a lot and it was awesome. I loved going down to the computer lab in the basement of my dorm and using it.
Physics 333?
Ha! There were some PLATO terminals at the University of Western Australia through to the 1990s. I spent a couple of months in 1990 using PLATO to learn to touch-type. My speed dropped from 35wpm to 20wpm, until I built it up again to a peak of 95wpm a few years later, reached by spending hours on IRC typing in complete sentences.
Always wanted to get out to Western Australia and Perth... still hope to visit some day. I have a video somewhere still of Don Bitzer's PLATO demo/presentation that he gave there in 1976 which was aired nationally on ABC in Australia.
Plato Homelink was my first online community, circa 1984 (?), after a positive writeup in PC Magazine. It had a lot of positive tech features (graphics!). But mainly it was a warm and welcoming place, with friendly people who were really interested in learning from each other.
brian dear / orange07 / pea.... homelink customer too... it was crazy expensive. But then I wound up with two physical PLATO terminals at home, and I was dialing in to CERL for all the fun and games, and to umbc for work
In the summer of 1970 as an undergraduate at UIUC, I worked on a "predicting the future" game on PLATO. The idea was, rather than just do some simulation of the future based on a matrix of interactions, we would do the simulation, ask the player what seemed "wrong", and then adjust the interactions.
The trick was the tiny amount of memory available for each user -- 63 words -- not enough for much of a matrix. But words could have 8 characters, and we certainly did not need high precision in our interaction matrix, so I ended up packing 8 8-bit words in each variable, using masks and shifts, allowing much larger interaction matrices (I probably used 16x16)
Ten years later, the packing/shifting became a central part of one of the first widely used protein sequence similarity searching programs, FASTP (the precursor of FASTA and BLASTP).
I worked in the PLATO group at CDC from 1980 to 1986, both in authoring system and courseware development. The Magnavox terminal I took as salvage is now in the Computer History Museum, and I still have the wire-wrap prototype IST-3 in my storeroom.
Happy to answer any questions that people have.
Steve Nord! Nice to see youhere....
Ahh, sorry to say I'm not the person you're thinking of, Brian. That Steve passed away in 2020.
If you've ever enjoyed the game Rogue or roguelikes, Macromedia Flash, or the famous Mahjong Solitaire (among countless other influences), PLATO's influences are at hand.
You can also experience the wonders of PLATO through emulation: https://www.cyber1.org/
found these videos about the plato system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTmWcGhlXqA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THoxsBw-UmM
also there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
they mention that they were linked by a network, is it known what kind of transport protocol they were using on the CDC systems?
I feel directly connected to Plato via Silas Warner's Robot War which was very influential for me. It was light years ahead of other micro software at the time and I'm convinced that the Plato cocoon was a major source of ideas and experience for the young Warner.
This again. Ted Gioia also mentioned it this week. They did have some nice technology.
I was there then. My total interaction with PLATO was once, as an experimental subject for a Psych class. A friend of mine had one class that used it. The consensus of the internet-history mailing list is that they were not very influential.
They didn't "shape the future" because they kept to themselves, in their own building. We never saw them in the Digital Computer Lab. CDC completely missed the distributed computing revolution.
That's true except for the bit about Plato terminals in the library. In the school across town, in the high-school in Springfield, and in colleges in Dover, Tallahassee and Dallas.
I mean sure. Except for those places, the only place you could find a multi-thousand dollar PLATO terminal was the old RF research building. And CDC headquarters and a one or two at Cray's lab.
I went to FSU in Tallahassee for my undergrad. The PLATO machines were used for computer-based training for lower-level math classes. The only reason I knew about them was because I worked in the Math Help Center right across the hall, with an overlapping student user base.
I remember the orange screens. And remember a "squash the bug" game possible due to the press-sensitive screen. But while I remember the admin mentioning some of PLATO's broader capabilities, that wasn't part of the student culture or knowledge base.
The local online community, for example, was based around the CONFER program running on the CDC Cyber, a machine accessible via several unlocked terminal rooms running dumb terminals.
I then went to UIUC (Illinois) for graduate school, in the physics department. PLATO was much more integrated into school life there. But this was also the time of Archie and Gopher, and of course the Mosaic web browser came out of UIUC shortly after I arrived. I only ever used PLATO as a T.A., to enter undergrad grades.
Yeah, they could have joined the Internet revolution, but Minneapolis was the center for CDC and Cray, and they just missed it. Maybe "snooted it" is the better term.
Gopher, out of Minneapolis, was "the Internet revolution" for a year or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) .
I was at Illinois during 1992-1997. The school had a number of gopher services, and then ... poof, Mosaic. I think we set up our research group's http server in 1994. One of the PIs wanted to support both gopher and http, but by then the writing was already clearly on the wall, and we only did http.
There are some gopher diehards about. http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw . The relevant Wikipedia page says 'In February 2022 Veronica indexed 325 gopher servers.'
You’re missing the terminals in an academic music library in Perth, Western Australia, and terminals in a local jail there too. Term-talk, and the games, and p-notes were transformational for some of us, who later went on in tech roles.
I think there is SOME truth to this. I remember being there and thinking if this could go beyond their confines but it never tookoff!:)
I used plato and found it pretty meh.
MECC on the other hand
what was MECC?
Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. They put ttys and later silent 700s in elementary schools and libraries connected by dialup to a CDC. they had a early mud called Milieu that I spent a lot of time on...and I wrote some basic and pascal programs. in fact I think I took a programming class at some kind of summer school at the community college that was hosted there too.
MERITSS/MECC was a fun, funky time-share system. It used multiple peripherals to feed one central CPU (with not much memory). The access I used had an acoustic modem (using a dedicated line) and a Model-33 teleprinter with a ASCII paper tape reader/puncher for storage.
On good days, the time-share part was transparent. But there were dozens of access points; on rare days when most of them were in use, you could press a key and wait 10 or more seconds to get the character echoed back to the printer.
One day I got one hour of access to a plasma-screen PLATO, and it was amazing. Never again even saw another.
MECC also published software for the Apple ][, including the first version of Oregon Trail that kids played in schools.
btw, in "The Big Bucks" I have a (fictional) grad student Matt Feingold at U Minn. I've never even been to Minneapolis, but I did at least verify that there was married student housing, and they were not in the initial group for CSNet.
Matt sneak-installs ARCNet at the university, which I'm pretty sure never happened. There's also a fictional French professor "Dr. Caron" who talks about the (real) Minitel.
The Minitel actually was pretty decent, and they had a revenue model vastly different from what we've ended up with (the cost just ends up on your phone bill, and the service providers pay the phone company). I'm not saying this would be better, but at least no ads!
thinking about this now. its pretty clear to me that that early education in computing gave me this career. as a youth I never wanted to pursue it, but when it was computing or minimum wage for the 8th year in a row - I already had the tools I needed to start.
I first learned of PLATO thru the writing of the CRPG Addict: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/10/game-12-oubliette-197...
I recall Plato being installed at Florida State University (FSU) in the early 1980s. Never was given the opportunity to use it though.
While very impressive, I don't really see any clear signs/pieces of evidence that this effort shaped the future, though.
Xerox PARC stole everything they could from PLATO after their 1972 tour of PLATO and being PhDs never gave credit where credit was due! Picture language, app generator, multilingual fonts, a system so simple even a kid could learn to program it (I did at age 14, self taught), bitmap graphics, etc. When I went to work at Xerox Office Systems Division - the development arm of PARC - I would say that after 13 years of trying - with computers 10x faster - they were PARTIALLY caught up! Highly inferior communications tools, and no support for inter-terminal games . .
I never heard of the Plato connection when I worked on Star in the 80s at Xerox. This is news to me. I’d really like to see more documented proof of this.
I also working on the Multilingual stuff (I implemented the bidi stuff in the Star editor) with my friend Joe Becker and never heard of influence from PLATO. I’ll ask directly next time we talk but I just don’t believe it’s true at all.
The 1972 tour is widely known, but if you worked at Xerox in the early days you should know that they are good at taking credit and minimizing the work of others who came before them. It goes with the egos which were too large to fit in hyperspace. P.S. who are you? we should talk.
Thanks to you and the others for very thorough answers!
Computer History Museum DON BITZER 2022 Fellow https://computerhistory.org/profile/don-bitzer/
For pioneering online education and communities with PLATO and coinventing the plasma display
When networks like the Internet were still a research lab curiosity, Don Bitzer's multiuser PLATO system served as a dress rehearsal for what we do on those networks today – learn, teach, collaborate, chat, mail, play games, argue, and more. PLATO's courseware language and touchscreen, multimedia terminals previewed features of decades hence. PLATO was a postcard from the future of online communities, and its example would help make that future real.
Donald L. Bitzer was born January 1, 1934 and is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is co-inventor of the flat-panel plasma display and the "father of PLATO,” the world’s earliest time-shared, computer-based education system and home to one of the world’s most pioneering online communities.
History doesn't quite work as nicely as one might like. Fact is, dozens, probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of PLATO people wound up working in the tech industry, had long careers there at DEC, Data General, Sun Microsystems, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc etc etc etc.
The last section of my book documents some of the influences, including the most obvious one, Ray Ozzie's Iris project which created Lotus Notes, named after PLATO Notes. Lotus Notes had like 100 million users and was sold to IBM for billions of dollars. It had a huge influence on the corporate IT world.
And AuthorWare was developed by PLATO people, and got merged with Macromind, creating MacroMedia, which was ultimately gobbled up for billions by Adobe.
There's a lot of influence, but there's 100000x more noise and other stuff since, so it's buried and therefore the normal conclusion is "oh, there's no evidence so there was no impact" but that's too easy to dismiss... there's lots of impact, and PLATO people went everywhere, including me, doing a bunch of startups all of which were influenced by PLATO in one or more ways
Not just tech industry people. The prolific, Pulitzer prize winning novelist Richard Powers [1] learned to program on PLATO and worked as a programmer before quitting to write full-time. His novel The Gold Bug Variations [2] is set at a Midwestern university, I can't recall if it is identified as UIUC.
just reiterating this comment PLATO, including avatar (multiple versions), empire, etc are available at https://www.cyber1.org/
Related. Not much really. Others?
Irata.online: A PLATO service for retro computing enthusiasts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32600338 - Aug 2022 (26 comments)
The PLATO Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782661 - Jan 2022 (1 comment)
Irata.online a modern implementation of the PLATO computing system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24207044 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
John Hunter’s World Peace Game, Roger Ebert, and the PLATO System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460259 - June 2020 (9 comments)
PLATO, Graphics, Time-sharing in 1960s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21830810 - Dec 2019 (1 comment)
PLATO Notes released 40 years ago today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21186845 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)
A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615420 - March 2018 (45 comments)
When Star Trek’s Spock Met PLATO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16019201 - Dec 2017 (1 comment)
The Internet That Wasn’t: Review of “The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15784052 - Nov 2017 (24 comments)
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747924 - Nov 2017 (1 comment)
The Greatest Computer Network You’ve Never Heard of (PLATO) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703024 - Nov 2017 (3 comments)
Performing History on PLATO: A Response to a Recent SIGCIS Presentation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15542999 - Oct 2017 (1 comment)
Want to see gaming’s past and future? Dive into the “educational” world of PLATO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957552 - Nov 2016 (7 comments)
Ars Technica on the history of PLATO games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12827672 - Oct 2016 (1 comment)
PLATO (computer system) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6666430 - Nov 2013 (23 comments)
The Friendly Orange Glow (which a few of these reference) has easily the most information I've ever seen about PLATO in one place. (Perhaps more than you'd like, if you don't care for the university politics surrounding it - but hey, it's comprehensive.) For anyone who's at all interested in PLATO, I'd recommend giving it a read.
Second the recommendation. Great book.
Looking at the general mood people had towards computers in the 60s, it's clear computers and any computer technology seem to follow a three decade trend of speculation, readjustment and push back, then full adoption.
First decade: philosophical fervor, extreme optimism and speculative wonder into how the future will change
Second decade: Post-bust adjustment, pessimism, bias towards return to normalcy
Third decade: Full integration, time before feels alien
1960s: computers are a world changing, mind opening key to an unimaginably bright future
1970s: computers are just another tool and overhyped, not a change to the status quo
1980s: computers are inseparable from almost every part of our day to day lives
1990s: The internet is a world changing, mind opening key to a unimaginably bright future
2000s: the internet is just another tool and overhyped, not a change to the status quo
2010s: the internet is inseparable from almost every part of our day to day lives
2000s: AI is a world changing, mind opening key to an unimaginably bright future
2010s: AI is just another tool and overhyped, not a change to the status quo
2020s: AI is inseparable from almost every part of our day to day lives
1980s: computers are inseparable from almost every part of our day to day lives
As someone who lived through that period, I don't think so. That description would be more applicable to ~2010+.
Your comment does not reflect history in the U.S.A.. And judging from the GP "our day to day lives" is very much U.S. centric.
Transportation: ""By 1981, all GM vehicles would be equipped with their new Computer Command Control System ("CCC") emission control system that featured an ECM (Electronic Control Module) that featured a Motorola 6802 based 8-bit microprocessor manufactured by Delco Electronics. "" https://www.chipsetc.com/computer-chips-inside-the-car.html
Entertainment - video games:
""we saw the release of all-time classic games such as Pac-man (1980), Mario Bros (1983), The Legend of Zelda (1986), Final Fantasy (1987), Golden Axe (1988), etc."" https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/evolution-of-home-video-game-c...
Financial - personal:
ATMs were quite common if no ubiquitous by the mid 1980's "" "The origins of the cashless society: cash dispensers, direct to account payments and the development of on-line real-time networks, c. 1965–1985" "" https://web.archive.org/web/20140714184815/http://www.ebhsoc...
Business:
VisiCalc came out in 1979, and spreadsheets were common in business offices in the U.S.A. through the 1980's.
Entertainment - TV and movies:
Computers were also used in commercial and movie production (ex. the 1984 Macintosh commercial, Pixar founded 1986 more or less out of Lucasfilm, and note that the VideoToaster came out for the Amiga in 1990 bringing professional level video production to a much more accessible price point.)
Due to the telescoping nature of innovations it was likely a longer and more spaced out series of advances. Nevertheless in business computers were ubiquitous by the 1980s
Interesting since cryptocurrencies are in their 2nd decade now.
I stumbled on this book in the Menlo Park public library and really enjoyed it. I also wondered why I had never heard of PLATO. Very good read.
In the seventies "Computer lib / dream machines" by Ted Nelson covered all the hottest computer systems in North America and included among them small talk and Plato and the logo Lab at MIT and graphics at Utah and a few others.
Xerox PARC researchers visited PLATO in 1972 and when they got back to Palo Alto they implemented just about everything they saw! App generator for pictures (SD Mode), paint (charset editor), bitmap /memory graphics display (plasma panel), multiple fonts and character sets, etc!
I felt it a bit confusing, going back and forth through time more than it'd be needed.
Friendly Orange Glow is unfortunately kind of overstuffed, meandering and political and focused excessively on bitzer, and misses so much of what PLATO/NovaNET were to so many people. Empire, avatar, oubliette, dnd, even moonwar, typomatic, Room B/C, night ops, pso, AIDS, TERM-test, cherry keyboard hoarding, stig bjorklund, the chem lab, the trs-80 running the satellite, lippold haken and the music room, bigfoot. I don't know if it's possible to write the PLATO story but FOG only skips across the surface.
I loved the avatar gameplay and the fact that it wasn't a "massively" multiplayer dungeon crawl, but rather something small enough that you knew most of the players. I'd trade a lot of the scale and graphics of modern gameplay for a return to the deliberate party based run of modestly updated avatar.
I sometimes think about bringing back avatar. I was one of the avatar ops, and came up with the idea of the afterlife, which was intended to improve its single player playability, but my version (navatar) was maybe a bit too sprawling and ambitious.
In case you take it up as a retirement project: what I'd love to see is an avatar builder's kit. Create the core engine, a basic level, monster, item, and class editor, and let people mod it. The basic party mechanics and att/def model could be standardized, but let people create their own game based on their own data. Create the hooks for people to add additional gameplay (ingredients, etc). Let people self-host.
Like you, I think about doing this every couple years. :)
Hey felix, avatar is currently running at https://www.cyber1.org/
I'm the author of The Friendly Orange Glow. I agree the book skips across the surface.
Some backstory: I originally proposed three volumes, each 1000 pages, to the publisher. They laughed and told me absolutely no. My thinking was, PLATO as a topic needs to be approached the way Robert Caro approached Lyndon Johnson. It's going to need multiple 1000-page books.
The publisher's reaction to my proposal was laughter. Their deal was, one book, 150,000 words, take it or leave it. So I took it: I'd spent 30+ years working on the project, had accumulated some 7 million words of interview transcripts, and had to get it out. In the end I delivered 229,000 words to the publisher which even then was the result of painful and severe chopping out of not only major sections but even entire chapters--all kinds of history got removed from the manuscript. (By the way, the final book came out to 209,000 words. Publisher was pissed that it wasn't 150,000. Editor, god bless him, stood by me, and we shipped 209,000 words. Publisher, I firmly believe, punished me by listing the book at a $40.00 list price, which is instant market death for a hardcover book in 2017. Powell's refused to let me do a book event because they don't allow $40 books to be presented by authors. It was sabotage, in my opinion. The publisher did atrocious, half-hearted work at publicity. They sent seven copies to people at the New York Times, which did nothing and never reviewed it. Nor did WPost. Nor did LA Times. Or SF Chronicle. Or Boston Globe, etc, etc. Only Wall Street Journal reviewed it, and they gave it a glowing review.
But here's the thing... anyone who knew and used PLATO is going to have their pet topics and focus areas, and complain about topics the book did include that are not favorites to them personally. Trust me, I've heard from thousands of PLATO people and everybody's happy and unhappy at the same time with what is in, and what is not in, the book. But I didn't write the book for PLATO people. I wrote it for the 8 billion people on Earth who'd never heard of PLATO and who were likely to never hear of it and its significance if something didn't get published that triggered PLATO to finally enter the conversation.
And look what's happening: Y Combinator's Hacker News is talking about PLATO! Ars of all things is talking about PLATO! In the past 5 years, Slate and WIRED (who always hated PLATO and refused to mention it) talked about PLATO. Verge and Motherboard covered it. PLATO is now a part of the conversation. Mission accomplished.
Finally: If you want to get a copy and read The Friendly Orange Glow, you can buy a hardcover from me directly by going to the Amazon site's hardcover page for the book, and selecting a "New" copy from seller Birdrock Books. That's me. I'm selling new copies for $11.11. Brand new, out of the box from the publisher. They come from me, with my signature on it.
I've read all four volumes of Caro's LBJ biography and praying he doesn't die before finishing the final one.
PLATO is not in that category, sorry. I was there (at UIUC). PLATO had an extremely small influence on the University, and especially on the Dept. of Computer Science. We never saw them at DCL.
According to the internet-history mailing list (which has essentially all the pioneers who are still alive), they had negligible influence on the Internet.
That's not to denigrate PLATO and what they did. It was the pinnacle of what you could do with a mainframe-and-terminals system. They could have had a much bigger influence on computers and society than they had.
[flagged]
Sorry you find HN participation "weird."
Why did you go the book route? It sounds like you spent a vast amount of effort to ship a book which fell radically short of your vision & available material, which made the most nugatory profit (and by any honest accounting was a big financial loss to you), and which didn't succeed at making a mark as a formal prestigious book. Wouldn't've it have worked a lot better to focus on a comprehensive website where you could put up all the material and solicit submissions?
What I wanted to do was a film documentary. What stopped me was, there was no footage! Meaning, nobody at CERL, the PLATO lab at U Illinois, had filmed everything. Nobody was a movie camera nerd. Nobody captured all the historical events, or even just day to day meetings / demos. It wasn't that kind of lab: everyone was insanely focused on the work at hand, and the culture was never one to expend any cycles on documenting how things went along the way. So there's a paper record, but very little in the way of footage. And if you do a documentary feature film you need TONS TONS TONS of video and film footage.
I did consider a website but ugh, it limits the audience. It doesn't get into bookstores. It doesn't get on college syllabi. You gotta do a book. So I did a book.
As for big financial loss, I knew going into the project I'd never make back what I put into the project over ~30 years. I didn't care; that wasn't the goal. The goal was to capture the story while the criticial mass of key PLATO people were still alive, and then put that into print so the world would know about PLATO before it all disappeared--believe me, the Silicon Valley tech industry would be perfectly happy if PLATO had disappeared. It messes so much with their mythology, after all! So that was a big motivator. The book has done fairly well, actually, and continues to sell in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook editions.
Someone needs to connect you to Stripe Press (maybe folks in HN can do it?)
Stig Bjorklund?!
Stig was a cool guy, RIP.
Also interesting: a write-up of the second-ever TED conference (in 1990!) by Brian Dear!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35216875