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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 experi

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.

vipvipv 4y ago
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!:)
convolvatron 4y ago
I used plato and found it pretty meh. MECC on the other hand
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  what was MECC?
  - convolvatron 4y ago
    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.
    - joezydeco 4y ago
      MECC also published software for the Apple ][, including the first version of Oregon Trail that kids played in schools.
    - convolvatron 4y ago
      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.
    - 8bitsrule 4y ago
      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.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      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!
retrocryptid 4y ago
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.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  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.
  - dalke 4y ago
    Gopher, out of Minneapolis, was "the Internet revolution" for a year or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) .
    - retrocryptid 4y ago
      Once long ago I worked for Convex Comouter Corporation. We sold mini-super-computers. I was on the team that converted all our docs to lightly formatted text files so we could distribute them via gopher. Three days after putting everything up on gopher one of my co-workers came in with a tape from NCSA saying "hey. I got this interesting program from the NCSA guys. They call it a web browser." (But early versions of mosaic and navigator understood Gopher URLs, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.)
      - dalke 4y ago
        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 http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw . The relevant Wikipedia page says 'In February 2022 Veronica indexed 325 gopher servers.'
com 4y ago
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.

vipvipv 4y ago

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!:)

convolvatron 4y ago

I used plato and found it pretty meh. MECC on the other hand

AlbertCory 4y ago
what was MECC?
- convolvatron 4y ago
  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.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    MECC also published software for the Apple ][, including the first version of Oregon Trail that kids played in schools.
  - convolvatron 4y ago
    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.
  - 8bitsrule 4y ago
    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.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    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!

retrocryptid 4y ago

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.

AlbertCory 4y ago
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.
- dalke 4y ago
  Gopher, out of Minneapolis, was "the Internet revolution" for a year or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) .
  - retrocryptid 4y ago
    Once long ago I worked for Convex Comouter Corporation. We sold mini-super-computers. I was on the team that converted all our docs to lightly formatted text files so we could distribute them via gopher. Three days after putting everything up on gopher one of my co-workers came in with a tape from NCSA saying "hey. I got this interesting program from the NCSA guys. They call it a web browser." (But early versions of mosaic and navigator understood Gopher URLs, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.)
    - dalke 4y ago
      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 http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw . The relevant Wikipedia page says 'In February 2022 Veronica indexed 325 gopher servers.'

com 4y ago

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.