4 ms·

John Hunter’s World Peace Game, Roger Ebert, and the PLATO System

37 points by brianstorms 6y ago

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
I remember Plato. In our lab, it was used mostly to play John Daleske's Empire, a space game. It was graphical and the coolest thing around! Then years later, working on 802.11 radio drivers, I ran into John at a job. One of my youthful heroes! And a regular guy, plugging away writing software for industry. Anyway, most folks who saw Plato were affected by it. Lightyears ahead of other text-terminal computers of the time.
- 8bitsrule 6y ago
  I remember seeing one - a time when I'd never seen a terminal that wasn't an ASR-33 teletype - hidden way back in the faculty section of a college computer department. I was given 15 minutes to try out 'Oregon Trail'. Mindblowing display concept. PLATO definitely looked like an inevitable future. Unfortunately, in most places the educational establishment was not ready for it. Even 10-15 years later most people still wondered what use home computers could have. Recipes? Games? Tax returns? Anything else?
davidf18 6y ago
Ebert newspaper articles from 1962 are in the medium article. Discusses helping high school students using PLATO in 1962!
krallja 6y ago
My aunt gave me the author’s book as a gift a few years ago. It was quite an astounding read.
- cnasc 6y ago
  I loved The Friendly Orange Glow. I wish people currently put more emphasis on the “fast round trip” like the PLATO designers did
tibbydudeza 6y ago
I studied at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and we had a Plato system donated by Control Data for e-learning. It was rather awesome esp when I discovered the games "directory" ... it had a asteroids clone.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  This is very impressive. That'd have required a lot of bandwidth between the computer and the terminal. Did it have the plasma screen or was one of the later CRT-based ones?
pnathan 6y ago
I have to wonder what the best in class teaching systems are for computers these days. Not "edutainment", but real educational approaches.
toss1 6y ago
Also of note, Ray Ozzie, who was best known for creating Lotus Notes (later causing IBM to purchase Lotus), also worked on PLATO [1] while an undergrad at U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Lotus Notes was based in part on his experiences using the PLATO Notes group messaging system [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie

37 points by brianstorms 6y ago

I remember Plato. In our lab, it was used mostly to play John Daleske's Empire, a space game. It was graphical and the coolest thing around! Then years later, working on 802.11 radio drivers, I ran into John at a job. One of my youthful heroes! And a regular guy, plugging away writing software for industry. Anyway, most folks who saw Plato were affected by it. Lightyears ahead of other text-terminal computers of the time.

8bitsrule 6y ago
I remember seeing one - a time when I'd never seen a terminal that wasn't an ASR-33 teletype - hidden way back in the faculty section of a college computer department. I was given 15 minutes to try out 'Oregon Trail'. Mindblowing display concept. PLATO definitely looked like an inevitable future. Unfortunately, in most places the educational establishment was not ready for it. Even 10-15 years later most people still wondered what use home computers could have. Recipes? Games? Tax returns? Anything else?

davidf18 6y ago

Ebert newspaper articles from 1962 are in the medium article. Discusses helping high school students using PLATO in 1962!

krallja 6y ago

My aunt gave me the author’s book as a gift a few years ago. It was quite an astounding read.

cnasc 6y ago
I loved The Friendly Orange Glow. I wish people currently put more emphasis on the “fast round trip” like the PLATO designers did

tibbydudeza 6y ago

I studied at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and we had a Plato system donated by Control Data for e-learning. It was rather awesome esp when I discovered the games "directory" ... it had a asteroids clone.

rbanffy 6y ago
This is very impressive. That'd have required a lot of bandwidth between the computer and the terminal. Did it have the plasma screen or was one of the later CRT-based ones?

pnathan 6y ago

I have to wonder what the best in class teaching systems are for computers these days. Not "edutainment", but real educational approaches.

toss1 6y ago

Also of note, Ray Ozzie, who was best known for creating Lotus Notes (later causing IBM to purchase Lotus), also worked on PLATO [1] while an undergrad at U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Lotus Notes was based in part on his experiences using the PLATO Notes group messaging system [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie