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A Book Recommendation for Bill Gates: The Story of PLATO
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: This holiday season, many Slashdot readers are likely to find gifts under the tree because of Bill Gates' book picks. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it seems that turnabout is fair play -- what book recommendations do you have for Bill?
At the top of my pick list for personalized learning advocate Gates would be Brian Dear's remarkable The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, with its tale of how a group of visionary engineers and designers -- some of them only high school students -- created a shockingly little-known computer system called PLATO in the late 1960s and 1970s that was decades ahead of its time in experimenting with how people could learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected terminals and computers. After all, "we can't move forward," as Audrey Watters argued in The Hidden History of Ed-Tech, "til we reconcile where we've been before."
At the top of my pick list for personalized learning advocate Gates would be Brian Dear's remarkable The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, with its tale of how a group of visionary engineers and designers -- some of them only high school students -- created a shockingly little-known computer system called PLATO in the late 1960s and 1970s that was decades ahead of its time in experimenting with how people could learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected terminals and computers. After all, "we can't move forward," as Audrey Watters argued in The Hidden History of Ed-Tech, "til we reconcile where we've been before."
How about "The Kids Took my Job"? Great book!
I love looking at old-style keyboards. They have so much variety and uniqueness, before the monoculture that we have now took over. (I'm not interested in superiority or inferiority, just the artistry that went into the different keyboards. Core memory is just as great).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'd recommend A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade.
Maybe then he'd stop wasting his money on doing things that can't be done, and spend his money on something sensible such as spaceflight, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
They (the University of Illinois, U of Hawaii, Parkland College (junior college in Champaign, IL)) had classes that used lessons on PLATO. The university had junior high and high school students code the lessons in exchange for computer time.
I mostly stole accounts from people who did the actual work.
Passwords were a lot easier to guess back then. One login was "mathstudent", password "uimath." Weird to remember that 40 years later.
See subject: To whom it may concern - the freak I'm replying to has some dumb scheme in impersonating me folks - ignore him.
APK
P.S.=> You're a whackjob freak - no questions asked - this has to be the 10th time you've impersonated me this week alone! apk
"Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland
Inadequate Equilibria is a (freely available) online book about how and why our civilization succeeds at some things, such as predicting the future value of Microsoft stock, and fails at others, such as determining the optimal diet to remain healthy. It's one of the most interesting books I've ever read.
I'm old enough to remember having an Author logon on PLATO at FSU in 1977.
I hope Bill Gates reads the words of Jesus Christ. Microsoft has made far too much of their fortune by being as evil as the tax collectors in the Gospel. Perhaps he could learn a thing or two from the teachings of Jesus Christ.
That and much, much more in Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This is the technology industry -- history is not only ignored, but actively ridiculed and marginalized. Nobody who would benefit from it would actually read this stuff, they're too busy writing the next throwaway JavaScript framework.
Alan Kay was sadly correct about programming being a pop culture. Which is very dangerous for something that's increasingly ruling our lives at a very deep level.
Bill Gates' first question:
"How can I make money off it?"
AC
Ask a stupid question
I came across PLATO at a Chicago suburban Junior College in 1981. There were only 2 terminals, but I loved the connectivity to University of Illinois!
A few years ago I visited UofI and there's a PLATO terminal on display: under glass. How quickly tech fades...
I worked for Control Data in the early 80's. While browsing through equipment in their Corporate Recovery Department with a friend of mine we came across several Plato Terminals (think is was 3-4) and we purchased them. We wanted to experiment with them, they were really ahead of their time.
;) a real bummer.
Got them home and found out they had pulled all the display cards out. Otherwise they were complete. But Control Data kept any information and the cards themselves in-house. We were never able to do anything with them or get a hold of any display cards/information
Ah PLATO - a system I knew about back in the day, and which we actually had some terminals for on campus (down in the medical research center on campus) and which I spent most of an academic year trying to find someway to gain access, unsuccessfully! I had the endorsement of a couple of professors, and a upper division research course to provide justification, but - nope, no way to do it. They were installed as part of grant program to the medical center, and although no one was even using them I couldn't even see the terminals, much less touch or use them.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I got to play with a Plato terminal on a college campus around 1979 or so, it was really cool. Way beyond anything the standard campus terminals could do.
Years later I stumbled across this article:
https://www.wired.com/1997/03/platofest-to-celebrate-first-online-community/
I didn't recall the name Brian Dear, but he was interviewed:
“I was given a tour of the Chemistry Learning Center today, to a room where there had been PLATO terminals,” Dear continues. “The cable for the terminals was literally hanging from the wall, the terminals have been replaced by IBM PCs, and the students were using the Web. With PLATO, if you asked a question, you got an answer back in less than a second. If you ask a question on the Web, it can take as long as 15 or 20 seconds to get your answer, while the Net clunks away. The students were falling asleep. I asked myself, ‘Is this progress?’”
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Bill Gates should read "Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos" by Garrett Hardin. Gates' philanthropy focuses on saving lives in places already straining the local carrying capacity. Hardin's book explains why such a strategy will only cause more suffering in the long run.
Audrey Watters article should really be bookmarked not just for the PLATO reference but why computers in education* are a failure.
*Why didn't LOGO take off?
I had an author signon in the University of Maine group (mainei) which I lost when I annoyed many participants in the =events Notes forum. They were angered by my expressing Conservative views, and caused much trouble. Annoying sysops can lead to entire systems being deleted. I surrendered.
But I played a lot Avatar, lots. Among other things, Avatar had an in-game chat system most useful for players to organize and accomplish what they could not alone. But it was multipurpose.
I found that my afternoon sessions (that lasted into evening) began to get a lot of game chat from members of a group called 'pima'. Mostly asking "asl" and then nothing,.. Few of them had significant characters, and in fact didn't seem to be playing at all. Sure enough, it was 3pm in Arizona, and the Pima Correctional Facility, which hosted many juvenile offenders. When they finished their classwork in the GED curriculum, they were permitted to play games. Mostly however, they used these in-game chats to connect with anyone outside of the jail. Being teenagers, they were mostly just looking for contact, wanting to know age, sex, and location of anyone willing to respond. Kids.
But I left mainei for two years, getting a signon and hanging out in a USM room where terminals were, no dialup permitted since the unwashed kept causing problems. But that ended.
And I found Cyber1, and play Avatar in that game universe when I can. Cyber1 has done well with their implementation, very well. They have some great lessons available. And they beg for more, if you have any files to share.
Great fun , PLATO. Still remarkable, with email, chat, instant messaging, forums, and of course courseware. Remarkable. They also built plasma displays for terminals at UICU, and those were noted by IBM among others...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
A preparation for road ahead.
If I recall correctly, the language PLATO was programmed in was called 'Tutor' and the individual programs were called 'lessons'.
The trial for the local university started to go pear-shaped when they realized students were all using the chat features, then they banned chat. I responded with an alternative that used common memory to share information between people, but because there was no easy way to capture input, it forced an error ( early lesson termination ) every 10 seconds, flushed the keyboard buffer to common memory for lesson-debugging, and then began again.
The program then searched every other piece of common memory for flushed buffers and displayed them on the screen.
It worked well enough as a chat program, and because it operated at the lowest level of function, they couldn't shut it down. Next month they ran the stats and my "lesson" had clocked up over 95% of system utilization... I guess it was rather popular.
Still, it was an advanced system and lent itself to some cool stuff. The vector graphics was handled in the terminal and so it was only necessary to pass co-ordinates and text content along the 9600 baud links. Kind of like programming a webpage in SVC format.
Because of it's display capabilities, even over relatively slow connections, it really did feel like a precursor to HTML.
PLATO made the batch IBM370-158 I worked on at North campus , Norman. OK look like a bad joke, I use to make excuses to visit our NRJE site in OKC so I could play with the Med students Plato IV terminals and use them for impromptu coding..
an old fart
That's like asking - ..... anything
A vegan for a steakhouse recommendation.
A Mormon for a cigarette.
John Phillip Sousa for a waltz.
Henry Kissinger for an accurate history of the Vietnam war.
Donald Trump
The Pope for the name of an abortionist
Stephen Hawking for his choice of running shoes
""640K ought to be enough for anybody"
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
... but what if Bill does not like dumb Dogs?
"I should have done it earlier. It's so nice to crawl into the chair with the tablet/hardcopy and just go through it".
First paragraph.
"Hmm.... Is that true? Let me Google this up.... "
and we are done. I know, I have an attention span of the teenager.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
What the hell. Why are you posting this shit in multiple unrelated postings?
PLATO is still a thing. It's still misused the same way other tools in this area are; as a replacement for teachers. There are also ALS and Edgenuity and I'm sure many others.
I believe the ultimate goal is to have no teachers only non-union class room babysitters with kids in front of computers. This does not work well in a K12 environment where kids are mostly treated and kept as prisoners against their will.
They cheat liberally with minimal supervision and there is no one around who can answer their questions if they're among the few who are trying.
$.02
Posting anon because this probably already enough to ID me.
When I graduated from UMass/Amherst, we had just installed a new-to-us (we got a good deal on someone else's upgrade) CDC Cyber-74. We had no PLATO terminals, but the CDC people were milking it for all the advertising value they could get out of it. I worked in the Computing Center, and took the required assembly language programming course on that monster. 60-bit word and hardware floating point was a Big Deal.
Why, yes, I *am* an antique technology junkie. Took a programming (wiring) class on the IBM 402 Accounting Machine (weighed about as much as a VW Beetle) in high school and repaired Teletypes in college.
Good times.
I was a PLATO author and user in the mid-80s, starting at the University of Arizona. I worked on physics lessons. Tutor was a pretty straightforward language and pretty powerful, really. We did not have the kinds of tools programmers expect to have now - not even a real version control system. Still, we accomplished quite a lot. And yes, the chat and notesfile functions were easy to use and powerful (and popular).
Back to the original post, I am certain that Bill Gates, and Steve's Job and Wozniak, were both intimately familiar with the PLATO system. In another great book about the era, "Dealers in Lightning" about the team at XEROX Parc, in Palo Alto, "Early in 1972, researchers from Xerox PARC were given a tour of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois."
https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t...
Of course, a few years later, after building the Xerox Star with graphical interface, both Microsoft and Apple were given tours of the new graphical interface, and promptly incorporated the concepts into what became the MacIntosh and Windows OS.
And, on that note, I have very clear memories of installing Windows 2.0 on 80286 Hewitt Rand computers (not the other HP) using the then very very new "paper white" monitors.