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Where Were You When PLATO Was Born?
PLATO, cradle of so many firsts, was born 50 years ago. Next week the Computer History Museum is hosting a two-day conference to celebrate the anniversary. Microsoft's Ray Ozzie, who worked on PLATO as an undergraduate, will be one of the keynote speakers. Co-producer Brian Dear has put together a list of today's technology notables and what they were doing in 1973, the year that social computing suddenly blossomed on PLATO.
PLATO rocked, but to be honest it didn't have anything to do with me.
Think of a better headline.
I piss off bigots.
Sorry, but Plato was born and died a few thousand years before I was.
(Yeah, I know, wrong Plato, but with that headline, you knew someone was going to say it.)
The links don't say what PLATO is, except "the greatest untold story in the history of computing". So, what the heck is it?
Where were you when PLATO _WAS BORN_?
Then I read that PLATO was born 50 years ago.
Then I read that someone put together a list of what people were doing in 1973.
So, I'm to understand that 2010 - 1973 = 50.
I know it's news for nerds... but I've never heard of this PLATO (other than the philosopher), and it would be nice to explain what it is in the summary or in an editor's sentence at the start.
Ryan Fenton
...because I wasn't born yet.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
I was a four-year-old who had taken off the cover of the 26" TV console in the living room to poke around the glowing vacuum tubes. "Solid State" (TM) electronics was still a few years off. Surprisingly, I made it out of childhood without electrocuting myself too many times. Since then, I've been working my though every Fortune 500 company in Silicon Valley. Always arriving after some big name had left. Sad but true.
What ....is.... this.....play....doh....you .... speak....of?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
From what I've read about PLATO (I was born quite a bit after PLATO's heyday) it seemed to be in stark contrast with today's methods of teaching computers. It seemed like PLATO actually encouraged students to explore computers. Today though, teachers are too paranoid, thinking that the command prompt will "break" the computer and other stupidities.
And we wonder why America experienced a tech boom in the 70s-90s and its drying up. Between the changes in education, legislation designed to make it be even harder to produce technology in the US along with R&D and government-funded monopolies, I don't think we're going to be number one in technology again.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I used to work for them many years back and it was the most archaic company I have ever worked for. Far older than Microsoft or Apple or most other traditional technology companies. Your talking about a company that was old enough to have one of the original licenses for commercial Unix from the early 70's (it was considered an asset of some value at the time even though they no longer produced it). They had technology in use at that time that was 15-20 years old at and still actively supported.
I learned a lot by working with some pretty diverse environments - I distinctly recall having to solve a problem with token ring, 10base2, and a lightning strike all inside a federal maximum security prison. Did I mention the admins were convicted murderers?
The company today is a shell of it's former self, and I think surprises many with it's continued survival. They had a lot of very good internal technology staff, but have long been plagued by management issues. I recall before Y2K the company was claiming their software did not have Y2K issues when it was nowhere near Y2K compliant. Management officially refused to acknowledge the issue and threatened to fire anyone that put anything in writing.
I bribed a developer with a bottle of mountain dew to put a hard checksum into the installer code that would present a unique and undocumented error if someone tried rolling back the clock before installing the software. We got many calls about the mysterious installation error, with every institution that received it told to make sure their system date was correct. They survived Y2K without a single system going down, perhaps the first and last time a company was saved by a 20oz bottle of mountain dew.
They could have been sued into oblivion by any number of institutions if all their data was wiped as they knew about the Y2K issues. This was data that was used to do things like justifying rank for the military, determine if prisoners got out of prison or if students graduated school. Since their public stance was they were Y2K compliant, and a code review would prove otherwise, it was a pretty big deal at the time. When your customers are people like the federal government and the Bill Gates foundation, they have more money for lawyers than you do.
...and took away his planet and gave it some dwarfs.
Not to mention the humiliation of naming a cartoon dog after him.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Google Search Yields:
The PLATO system was designed for Computer-Based Education. But for many people, PLATO's most enduring legacy is the online community spawned by its communication features.
I work in a school that uses plato for an alternative education. Generally the degenerates end up there and "pass" their classes in a few weeks get a GED and go home. So basically it's a shared cop out for both the students and the district.
While some folks were connected enough to play with PLATO, I was trying some then-new calculator "games", where the pseudo text answers to your arithmetic questions appeared when the display was turned upside down. My device also did square roots! To prove my semi-geek cred, I've still got it (a Kingspoint), functional in all its VFD glory.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I wonder how many people we're going to make feel old with this one.
Adult Role Playing Forum
PLATO terminals were graphical orange-plasma-screen things, with the best interactive multiplayer Star Trek game *ever* (well, at least for 70s versions of "ever"), and an application called "notesfiles" that was a lot like Usenet or BBSs later became. My university had a few PLATO terminals, and I never had an "author account", so my access was read-only, but it was cool stuff.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I was the slap that my grandfather gave my grandmother's ass...
i was swallowing pills when dana plato was born. waaa choo talkin bout?
Or a stain on the sheets, you pick :)
I have fond memories of taking Physics quizzes and exercises on the PLATO machines at Loomis Laboratory while an undergraduate engineering student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the early 90s. The plasma monitors with their orange glow were cool for such "old" technology.
You are only popular on the Internet.
Our I.T. administrators at SDSU were soon calling the one demonstration terminal we had for a few weeks the PLAY-DOH system. Who could ever forget playing Moonwar on it. Great fun for its time.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In the early '80's I made good money from CDC for a few years by converting PLATO ed games to every micro under the sun - Atari 800, TRS-80, Apple II, C-64. My partner Mike Johnston and I bankrolled development of our game ChipWits with money we saved from those contracts. The games we ported were pretty dry - Decimal Darts and such.
Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!
In regards to the question that is asked here the answer for simple for me.
I was nowhere, as I did not yet exist and I where therefore not yet born.
Jeez, I can't believe I'm the first actual Plato user to post. I played lots of games on Plato in the middle of the night while I was writing my thesis in 1977-1978. It was amazing at the time -- an online system where you could play real-time networked games with people across the country built around a plasma bit-mapped "high resolution" display (probably 512x512 pixels). There was even a quasi-three-dimensional game called dnd where you explored dungeons with a party of other players. ("Quasi 3-D" because all it could do was draw the lines indicating the corners of walls, ceilings, floors.)
Anyway, I think it was way ahead of its time. I don't know how successful it was as an educational system, but it ought to be legendary as a network gaming system.
... Is 50?!?
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
A few handful of molecules decided to say hi to each other.
Oh yeah, that was my mother, woops.
Well... i guess the same thing still applies.
Even that one is still too old for me.
Damn all you old people in the future from this post!
I'll shake my walking stick at you too!
Ah, jokes about ill-health, a great game for all the family.
Micro$$$oft? Aren't they Teh Evil????
Total fucking fail.
Not even yet a tickle in my father's pants.
I remember sneaking into the CCIS Microlab at Rutgers University in Piscataway at age 13. Apple-Trek on the old Apple IIs was OK fun, but the real run to be had was plaing Empire on the Plato systems!
Getting 403 on one of your links>
http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2010/05/where-were-they-in-1973.html
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /blog/2010/05/where-were-they-in-1973.html on this server.
Apache/1.3.41 Server at www.platohistory.org Port 80
I was a four-year-old who had taken off the cover of the 26" TV console in the living room to poke around the glowing vacuum tubes.
I'm not very far behind you.
In 1973, I was three years old, my dad was a TV repairman who owned his own TV repair business, and I took apart every gadget I could get a screwdriver to.
However, If I tried to remove the back panel of the living room TV set, I would've got my ass busted in a big way. Twice. First by my mom, then secondly by my dad when he got home at the end of the day from running TV repair service calls.
Yes, back then you could still get TV repair service at home.
OMG I worked on the Physics 2 series in 1984-85ish... good times. I was at U of Arizona.
to bad /.doesn't have afunction that makes a histogram of userId#s; can't be a lot of articles with 50 replies that include a 3 and a 4 digit user id
This one. He was born 1950, or thereabouts.
I was there 86 - 90 and remember both the old plasma screens and newer green-screen CRT displays. A lot of the plasma terminals didn't work very well so everyone preferred the CRT ones.
I hated using PLATO for physics class because the software was so picky about the answer, giving an "incorrect" for things a human probably would have marked as correct.
As I recall I actually used the PLATO terminals in the basement of the Foreign Language Building more than the ones at Loomis just because they were closer to where I was living.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1980s and I flunked out of college in part because of spending too much time playing games on PLATO, particularly a MMO dungeon game called Avatar. The way things worked, the "free" (i.e. not connected to coursework) account I had could only be used at night. As a result, I and similar Avatar addicts would gather in the basement computer lab on Friday night and play until around 5AM or so, when the system went offline for maintenance. At that point we would go to IHOP for breakfast, then return at 6AM to play another couple of hours, until our accounts were booted off at 8AM.
Strangely enough, this was not conducive to good study habits! Luckily, after I flunked out, I managed to get accepted into another university which did NOT use PLATO! :-)
You can install software that emulates a PLATO terminal, allowing you to connect to a PLATO host (Cyber1.org).
Here's a video introduction to cyber1.org: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgMG9NCWoaU
And here's a video showing a battle in Empire (a Star Trek space battle game): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMPC1eG5cko
You'll need to view these videos large to really see what's happening.
Asking a question when you're looking for information is not the Socratic method. That's being a student, asking a teacher. The Socratic method involves the teacher asking the student a question in order to get the student to think about the problem.
IMO, the AC, despite being rhetorical, is much closer to being Socratic than GGP.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Fifty years ago next week
Screens alit with amber glow
Press the NEXT key to begin
Name/group and shift-STOP make it go
AUTHOR MODE choose an option
Pad, avatar, wasted, or empire kills?
But DATA leads to one concoction
That's fun to play and builds your skills
=BTYPING!
Dead.
I am, and that is sufficient.
Yea now that I think back I do recall the software being very exacting at times. I lived just down the street from Loomis but I do recall visiting the lab at FLB a few times.
You are only popular on the Internet.
I really didn't understand it, but it was new and I could get to some documents. Never knew how to use any chat function, but I do remember that I used a terminal, a breath of fresh air after punching Hollerith cards. A friend wrote a program to draw images on it. Little did I know.
As a kid. I don't remember exactly what the circumstances were, or how old I was (possibly middle school), but it was probably because the school thought I was smarter or stupider than the other students (it was often unclear which it was).
The school district had like one PLATO terminal in the district office locked up in a small room as I recall. I had no idea what the system was about, or what it's scope was, and as I recall I spent the time looking at a few of the games available on the system (probably to the disappointment of the administrators). They didn't invite me back :)
I wish I had known more about the system and what was possible, or maybe not, as that was more computing power (and network!) than I'd ever had access to before and probably would have been seduced beyond all hope of recovery.
G.
We had a wonderfull time playing fligh simulator (remeber becoming so often a peperoni pizza) or dungeon of moria with PLATO when I was freshmen ;-)
PLATO was born in 1960. By 1973 it had grown to the point that it
had boobs.
ftfy
Brian Dear, on PLATO: One of the most interesting little-known aspects of Xerox PARC has to do with its relationship to PLATO. What people don't realize is that Kay attended a 1968 symposium sponsored by ARPA, at the Univ of Illinois. Among the presenters was Don Bitzer and company, and what did they present? A 1-inch-by 1-inch prototype of a gas plasma flat-panel display. This was a major "aha" moment for Kay, who told me it was his "big whammy" epiphany. It suddenly occurred to him that computers of the future were not going to have big, bulky CRT screens, but rather, flat-panel displays. It is directly because of his seeing the demo of the PLATO plasma prototype that he got the idea for the Dynabook.
...directly above the exact center of the Earth.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
For those interested: PLATO was actually created around 1960 as an electronic instruction platform. But it wasn't until around 1973 that things really started to take off for PLATO. That's because the system had developed features like talking to others across a distance via terminals, graphics displays, etc. that wouldn't hit mainstream for a few years.
My Mom worked for CDC PLATO in the late '70s (or was it early '80s?) working in a group that provided English as a Second Language programs. I got my exposure to the PLATO system through her, but I didn't really care about the ESL stuff.
It was an impressive system, especially considering its time, featuring touch screen, networking, etc.
The PLATO system was created in 1960 at the University of Illinois. Initially it ran as a one-terminal system connected to the ILLIAC computer. By 1963, the system was running on a CDC 1604 with multiple simultaneous users. By 1972, the system had expanded to run a thousand simultaneous users on a CDC CYBER mainframe. Control Data Corporation began marketing PLATO commercially in 1976, resulting in PLATO system installations in dozens of cities around the world. Many of these systems were interconnected, enabling email and remote logins through the network. For nearly ten years, there were more users on PLATO than there were on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
http://www.platohistory.org/about/
stuff |
In base ten, you get fifty-four.
I used Plato as a cartridge on the TI-994/A...it was a math instruction course if I recall. I know the original Plato was an online system, and our TI-994/A was definitely *not* online, so it always confused me to hear about Plato as this enormous ecosystem, when all I thought of it was a boring program that kept me from playing "King Tut".
The only thing I do definitely remember about the program was that it was white text on a blue background, and the copyright included the University of Illinois, which being from Chicago, gave me some sort of excitement that if I went there, *I* could write programs for the TI-994/A! Maybe even the Apple ][!
Anyone else use this version?
Can't put a price on that.
And even if you could - you can't buy it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I was in High school in 1983, learning BAL on an IBM 370. I first used PLATO at UIUC in 1977, playing interactive D&Dgame. BTW, how is 1973 50 years ago?
I remember using PLATO in the mid 70s at UIC...played Airfight and Dungeon in the middle of the night when the system was faster. Also took the TUTOR programming course. Talkomatic was ahead of its time. Great system for the era.
PLATO I was born 50 years ago and PLATO IV was the first version that had anything resembling "social networking" (although PLATO III running on Cray's first computer -- Cyber 1604 -- did have real time multiuser games).
Seastead this.
You obviously didn't work in the language lab.
The drill and practice engine driving the vocabulary lessons of virtually all language courses was built around a model of short term vs long term memory where an erroneous answer would provide the negative feedback along with the correct answer and then almost immediately re-present the vocabulary term but a series of correct answers would shift that term further and further back in the queue so that the next time it appeared would help drive it into long term memory.
It was quite effective and actually made something that could be somewhat tedious actually entertaining.
Seastead this.
In the mid eighties, I spent many hours in the lab at the University of Illinois, working through endless physics problems on PLATO. It was a great system. I'm jealous that I never had access to games on it. From what others have said, there was some serious fun to be had there.
Remembering the interface, I can't help but think that a port/remake would be a perfect fit for Apple's iThings. Just the nostalgia aspect would probably force me to jailbreak my phone.
"Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching." - Dogbert.
1973? My parents hadn't even met at that point.
Hmmm, I should probably get off of this lawn.
TFA (yes I lookaed at it) listed people like the founders of Digg and FourSquare and LinkedIn, but what about the founders of /.?
I was still in liquid form dangling about...
Morons!
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
A very funny episode of Big Bang actually showed how to use a loop counter to break the loop, something I had not yet figured out back in '68, and obviously I was way ahead of the programming support at the high school at the time, so even if I were hiding from the sysadmin, he/she certainly did not live locally. Sigh, time to get out the suspenders and start talking like the Unix guru in Dilbert. I feel old.