I also wrote a piece on this book a couple of weeks ago (for Motherboard) and had a chance to interview Brian for it, and I feel like Brian's comments on the ma

I also wrote a piece on this book a couple of weeks ago (for Motherboard) and had a chance to interview Brian for it, and I feel like Brian's comments on the matter ring true—the most relevant parts of the PLATO story were the parts that really had nothing to do with the system's development and commercial sale, but the way that users invented ways to maximize the technology they had. One could argue that UIUC (and later Control Data) focused on the wrong system infrastructure by leaning on mainframes and ignoring the later impact of personal computers, but it risks missing out on the most interesting parts of this story, which are the ones where people who actually used the system broke its intended use case. Pieces like these are tough to break down—summarizing a 600+-page book in a 1,000-word article isn't for the faint of heart—but considering so much of the book was spent highlighting this point, the omission of this discussion in the linked review is unfortunate. (And for what it's worth, I'm not linking my piece because I don't come to criticize the writer or say my article is better, but because I think this context is important to highlight.)