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Actually, my favorite game works terrifically on my Surface Pro 3. And my Surface Pro 3 works very well thank you.

Yeah, it's a great game.

Memories! I played dnd, Oubliette and Moria in 1977 on Plato. It was an amazing system for its time. MMORPG (trek) and touch panels way back in '77

There even exists a PLATO emulation for those who really miss it: https://cyber1.org/

It already is running. 11/70? The initial system ran on Illiac I, then a CDC 1604 CDC, then PLATO IV ran on a variety of different CDC mainframes.

See http://cyber1.org/ for more information on the emulated system.

The comments seem to imply you can no longer experience PLATO. That's not true. There is an emulator for the PLATO Terminal available at: http://www.cyber1.org/ I even bought a really cool T-Shirt from them and a patch celebrating the 50th Anniversary of PLATO on June 2-3, 2010 in Mountain View California. Try it, if I remember right, even the old airplane design programs are there.

Remember "Press NEXT to begin".

I learned to program on PLATO. It was an AMAZING system. In addition to supporting a variety of development environments, their system used a proprietary language called TUTOR. A good bit of networking technology today is derivative of this amazing system. I wasn't rich, although I noted a lot of kids who had access to PLATO tended to be children of CEOs and such. My parents worked at a college that had a grant to have the terminals available. The games on the system were also amazing.

As a programmer, PLATO was a great example of the "cloud"-type systems that will eventually become standard.. what Google is doing and Adobe is now proposing was done in the 70s at Plato, with centrally-hosted apps that routinely are updated automatically. As developers we could put in requests for program features and see them reflected in newer versions of the API. 512x512 resolution, touch sensitive screens, multi-player, real-time games between people all over the world..... in the 70s.

By the way, the original PLATO system has been ported and is running over TCP/IP. If you're willing to donate to the project, they have been known to grant access to people wanting to experience what it was like. See: http://www.cyber1.org/

By the way if anyone has the archive of the PLATO game 0drygulch.. PLEASE contact them... we've been dying to find that code and put it online.

I get nostalgic playing Avatar. NOT to be confused with the current movie-based crap.

Nostalgic for my 920+ Ninja lost in the old NovaNET system.

Nostalgic for the Wyvern Skin left behind.

Nostalgic for the first forays into the 'new' Avatar, back then.

So I play the Cyber1 version. And it is sweet.

And you can, too. See you in the dungeon, probably dead (you).

I get nostalgic playing Avatar. NOT to be confused with the current movie-based crap.

Nostalgic for my 920+ Ninja lost in the old NovaNET system.

Nostalgic for the Wyvern Skin left behind.

Nostalgic for the first forays into the 'new' Avatar, back then.

So I play the Cyber1 version. And it is sweet.

And you can, too. See you in the dungeon, probably dead (you).

For those who really care -- Plato (emulated) is still online.

Cyber1

notes is where Kapor got the idea for, um, Notes. Look it up.

Not to mention a few multiplayer games, in virtually every genre, that would have been MMOs except for the problems of any lesson being massive. I saw 25 users in Avatar pretty regular, and once I think I saw 42, but that might have been my imagination. Gaming was bit on PLATO, especially in the UICU days. The times it reported to to be running 24.9 hours a day were fun times indeed.

In 1973, I was learning digital logic, microprocessors, and microwave technology in the USAF. Some time around 1988 I got into Plato courtesy of the University of Maine. I also got kicked off, being just a little to far to the right for =events=. After more than a year hearing how I was Rush Linmbaugh's butt boy, I moved to southern Maine and *actually* heard him for the first time. Hmm. Yup, they were half-way correct - I was where Rush was. Not a good place to debate apartheid and the savings & loan scandals with a bunch of college professors and Marxist students. But it was fun while it lasted. Sorry for all the problems, mainei. They restored the group from backups, right?

I still play avatar on Cyber1. Still good fun. Lots of stats, so come play Zavatar, the economy isn't ruined like the original, and the studs don't own everything yet.

This is why I run a beater. Much simpler to just swing and let the spellchuckers throw over you, so long as there's a healer that can raise you without comps, or someone who will bestow some PoY to de-age you after. Sucks to die old.

I've always run Ninjas in Avatar, an old NovaNET game (now on cyber1,apologies for /.ing them) which I started in on in about 1985 or so (hard to remember when). I know Jim, and I was the first of the =mainei signons to get whacked, having offended many UICU ops, admins, and profs with my political views in =events (at the time UICU was infested with leftists, Marxists, and socialists. Probably still is.)

I still play Avatar on cyber1, God forgive me, and I'm in my third year of learning to manage a healer and wizard. But I digress...

This is the age-old problem in all role-playing games. How 'realistic' do you want your fantasy?

Realisticaly, you would be an unusual specimen if you could in fact master all three major classes. Just the time needed to build knowledge and physique makes it impractical, as if fantasy is realistic at all. So games that enforce the three-class paradigm make sense. But more to the point, most good role-playing games are founded on team building.

Think about it. Playing D&D with just you, the all-powerful master, and a DM who tries to make you dead, and no one else? Pointless. A decent weekend playing D&D needed about a dozen people. Someone had to get pizza, beer, and toilet paper. Cmon, man.

So team play had to, from the beginning, be designed in. Best way to do that is to divide skills so that you need at least two on a team to survive surprise encounters, and of course three or more to challenge demigods. How many to thrash a boss? This is why I'm not the least into WoW or any of that, though Diablo II almost got my attention.

At some point, these games devolve into simple (?) problem-solving, and while the graphics are pretty, they genuinely never match up to my imagination. The last interation of Avatar on NovaNET statted off with a detailed description of many things, suchas the dungeon, monsters, and player characters. Well, I always thought Wyvern Skin was not very stinky, and there were LOTS of monsters taller than 9 feet. And the dungeon was sometimes pretty clean, and sometimes pretty nasty, and it didn't matter now deep you were. But telling me what the writers' concepts were was not good. Avatar is a graphics-challenged game. You needed an imagination if you were the least into fantasy.

Now, Avatar on cyber1 is dominated by problem-solvers, who cruise the bottom to find the next insanely great thing. And I run a beater because, sadly, I don't have to time to be part of a team and do more stuff. So my challenges are to survive surprises with really harsh monsters, beat down the rich ones, amass the next billion in gold, and find a damned RoTP please, if you don't mind, there has to be ONE MORE LEFT, ok?

The class complaint is just another variation on 'I want to be all-powerful'. Many a DM punished those who expressed that sentiment in their presence. No different with the video versions.

Good luck, and good hunting.

You can, in fact, still play Avatar by starting here. Unfortunately, every time I've tried, there's not a soul on- and of course, playing with others was the whole reason it was fun in the first place. It still amazes me that I'm old enough to have played some "dark age" foundational computer game. My 6-year-old son would no doubt simply blink in incomprehension if I ever tried to explain Avatar or Arctic, the mud I eventually graduated to.

An excerpt from a bit longer essay I wrote:

In August 1980, Byte magazine published its issue on the Forth programming language

At that time, I was working with Control Data Corporation's PLATO project, pursuing a mass market version of that system using the Intelligent Student Terminal (IST). The IST's were Z80 processor terminals sporting 512*512 bit mapped displays with touch sensitive screens and 1200bps modems that went for about $1500. We were shooting for, and actually successfully tested, a system that could support almost 8,000 simultaneous users on 7600-derived Cybers (the last machine designed by Seymour Cray to be marketed by CDC --with 60 bits per word, 6 bits per character, no virtual memory, but very big and very fast) with under 1/4 second response time (all keys and touch inputs went straight to the central processor) for $40/month flat rate including terminal rental. Ray Ozzie had been working at the University of Illinois on offloading the PLATO central system to the Z80 terminal through downloaded assembly language programming, doing exotic things like "local key echo" and such functions.

I was interested in extending Ray's work to offload the mass-market version of the PLATO central system. In particular I was looking at a UCSD Pascal-based approach to download p-code versions of terminal functions -- and even more in particular the advanced scalable vector graphics commands of TUTOR (the "relative/rotatable" commands like rdraw, rat, rcircle, rcircleb, etc.) if not entire programs, to be executed offline. Pascal was an attractive choice for us at the time because CDC's new series of computers, the Cyber 180 (aka Cyber 800) was to have virtual memory, 64 bit words, 8 bit characters and be programmed in a version of the University of Minnesota Pascal called CYBIL (which stood for Cyber Implementation Language). Although this was a radically different architecture than that upon which PLATO was then running, I thought it worthwhile to investigate an architecture in which a reasonable language (you should have seen what we were used to!) could be made to operate on both the server and the terminal so that load could be dynamically redistributed. This idea of dynamic load balancing would, later, contribute to the genesis of Postscript.

Over one weekend a group of us junior programmers managed to implement a good portion of TUTOR's (PLATO's authoring language) advanced graphics commands in CYBIL. Our little hunting pack at CDC 's Arden Hills Operations was in a race against the impending visit of Dave Anderson of the University of Illinois' PLATO project who was promoting what he called "MicroTUTOR". Anderson was going to take the TUTOR programming language and implement a modified version of it for execution in the terminal -- possibly in a stand-alone mode. Many of us didn't like TUTOR, itself, much. Indeed, I had to pull teeth to get the authorization to put local variables into TUTOR -- and we were determined to select a better board from our quiver with which to surf Moore's Shockwave into the Network Revolution. CDC management wasn't convinced that such a radical departure from TUTOR would be wise, and we hoped to demonstrate that a p-code Pascal approach could accomplish what microTUTOR purported to -- and more. We quickly ported a TUTOR central sy

if you're missing PLATO, you might be interested in cyber1.org. They have a history section there, and also a free (as in beer) client to access PLATO via the internet, with a big collection of original software. See also our own /. user Baldrson :-)

And, of course, you can still experience PLATO today at http://cyber1.org/, TERM-talk, pnotes, notesfiles, avatar and empire and, well, not everything, but lots of it!

Yes, and PLATO lives today: http://www.cyber1.org/

Rumor has it that it is being restored for Internet play on cyber1 as "0spasim". At least I've given them permission to restore the backup of 0spasim to that system, which is an emulation of the PLATO system upon a CDC Cyber 6400 emulation of one of Seymour Cray's original machines.

I also thought that Moria wasn't created until the late 70s, and there there were more traditional nethack-like games before then. I used MinnA instead of Cerl, so maybe it just took a long time to make it over there.

Plato was a really cool system. Back in the 70s and 80s, it was more like the modern Internet than the Internet was back then.

A good overview of Plato can be found at www.platopeople.com There is also a group of people trying to preserve the original plato system.

• http://cyber1.org/
• http://www.platopeople.com/
• http://www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm

What's fun is that running those old assembly language programs on an emulator on a modern computer can be very very fast. We've recently brought up a PLATO system, running on an emulated Cyber (60-bit one's complement machine). On a 1.8GHz Opteron, on a not-very-optimized-for-speed emulator, the thing is about 8 times faster than the original system was in the mid-70's, and we were running about 500 people on a dual-mainframe system back then. PLATO is a time-sharing system that runs under NOS, and implements its own language (internally, a combination of pcode-like execution intermixed with natively-compiled expression evaluation). So, an emulated system running an interpreted language, and you should be able to run 800-1000 people on it on a $2,000 computer (RAM and disk space, of course, is totally beyond what was available back then). Highly optimized emulation of the Cyber architecture can run 2-8 times faster (at least) than that (e.g. 15-50 times faster than the original machines) on the faster Alpha machines, and (due to total neglect of the Alpha line) the Opteron processors appear even faster (except my static translator from Cyber to Alpha assembly code would need to be modified to target AMD64 instructions, instead).

Also, relevant to this story, is that PLATO was also "one of the first time sharing systems" with "one of the first electronic mail" facilities.

See the Cyber1 web site for more information about bringing up a PLATO system.

Netrek is a good game, but it hardly qualifies for "birthplace". Netrek is directly adapted from the Plato game Empire, which was written in the 1970s. Plato terminals had 512*512 graphics back then, the whole system was way ahead of its time. They also had graphic multi-user dungeon games before MUD was even written. Some people have put together a working version of the old Plato system, complete with Empire, Oubliette, and Moria, at: http://www.cyber1.org - probably worth a look if you're really into the history of computer games. Interesting that they can effectively emulate an old 70s mainframe computer on a dual opteron running Linux these days.