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."

Comments

Recommendation

[110010001000]

How about "The Kids Took my Job"? Great book!

The smell of ancient keyboards

[phantomfive]

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).

Re:The smell of ancient keyboards

[Waffle Iron]

Core memory is just as great.

Sometimes it wasn't so great. Our entire PLATO installation was down for about a week after a storm that caused electrical power surges which somehow fried the decades-old core memory in the mainframe (although one would think that stuff would be resistant to getting zapped). Apparently, the memory in question was no longer readily available.

It is kind of amazing that the system supported about 400 interactive users on graphics terminals, all simultaneously sharing a single processor with compute power that was probably in the same ballpark as an 80286.

Re:The smell of ancient keyboards

[zaft]

While it's true the CDC processors weren't that powerful, they were designed for a lot of I/O throughput so it's not a good comparison.

A Troublesome Inheritance

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I'd reccomend Inadequate Equilibria

[Metaphorical Duck]

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.

PLATO?

[msauve]

That and much, much more in Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines.

PLATO

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates' first question:

"How can I make money off it?"

AC

Re: PLATO

[NicknameUnavailable]

"... so that I'll have more money to funnel out of the nations which gave it to me."

FTFY.

Plato Terminals

[oldgraybeard]

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.

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 ;) a real bummer.

PLATO I Hardly Knew Ye

[careysub]

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.

Re:PLATO I Hardly Knew Ye

[fermion]

There was a Plato in High School, though I don't know if I ever used it. We had actual computers, Apple and DEC, that we could actually code on and that is what most of us did. I probably was assigned work on Plato, but it recall it being boring.

I think what we can learn from the past is that simply that motivated students are going to learn anywhere, and less motivated students are not going to be more engaged just because throw new technology at them. I am a practical person so I learn when I solve practical problems. Have a computer instead of a worksheet did nothing.

I saw this several years ago when I working with a adaptive learning software. The motivated students, the ones who would learn everything no matter what, really learned a lot. Of course they would have learned it no matter what, so the advantage was that one could have a class ratio of 50 to 1 instead of of 30 to 1.

OTOH, the student who were most reluctant, the one who require personal attention,quickly figured that if the got everything wrong, the software would revert to the lowest level questions, and they would get their full completion credit for not really learning anything.

I see this 'magic bullet' fa;acy in many other places. For instance, Tesla want to makes public transit obsolete by selling autonomous cars and building tunnels. Of course the highways system and cheap cars were supposed to make public transit obsolete, but we see how that works. There is simply a geometry and physics issues, and stacking can only do so much.

Computing devices, if we really use them to redefine the way we educate, can really help the reluctant student. But if we are just trying to generate a profit by making it cheaper to educate the motivated student, we are not really doing anything at all. We are already very good at educated the motivated student. That is why most of the work that Gates and people like him has done has been a failure.

We need to learn from Plato that we can't just do the same thing, but simply put it one a screen or make it a game. We need to reach the student that will game the game.

Re:PLATO I Hardly Knew Ye

[JaredOfEuropa]

Lowering the price of education through the use of computers is a good thing. It doesn't only have to mean we can have more students per teacher, but it can also mean we can make learning material available to people who don't have it. Students in developing countries are teaching themselves all manner of skills, where before they didn't have access to a teacher let alone the right books. And its not basic education (many of them do have that), but advanced subjects and vocational training.

Reaching the reluctant student remains a challenge; computers offer some means like gamification to help challenge them, but I agree that we don't really have a strong success rate on that yet. The one line I heard most when I worked in education innovation is: "the classroom sucks", yes, we all know it does. But when it comes to hard-to-motivate students, I don't think we've come up with anything better. In a classroom at least we can prevent them from running off and being distracted, and hopefully bore them into learning something.

Re:PLATO I Hardly Knew Ye

[mapkinase]

Access to terminal was the major hurdle these days, very true. The queue books, the limits "one hour per session", people hanging over your shoulder, counting minutes till your turn, and, finally, the green glimmer on your screen.

Re:PLATO I Hardly Knew Ye

[Gibgezr]

I'll counter with some proof: a local high school identified the most "at-risk" students it had, mostly by attendance records. It then took the worst of the worst and put them in a special class. They had one instructor, who made them a deal: if they spent the mornings on self-paced learning modules in PLATO,, he'd teach them how to make video games in the afternoons (and allow them to PLAY video games as well). The end result? That class went from the MOST at-risk to the LEAST at-risk in one year. The self-paced PLATO modules, while ancient and clunky, freed the students from the strictures of having to follow along with a set curriculum at a set pace, and that was what these students needed to succeed.

That's fucking success.

Re:PLATO I Hardly Knew Ye

[AntronArgaiv]

The senior software engineer in the communications and networking group at Data [Soul of a New Machine] General was an MIT dropout. Really smart guy and a genuinely nice person as well. Very smart people are sometimes bored with the pace of school.

Hi, Larry!

Wired article

[mfnickster]

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?’”

Re:Wired article

[JaredOfEuropa]

On the web, everyone can be a student, but they also get to be an author or even a teacher if they want. And many people do. In those 15 or 20 seconds, I can find information on programming Arduinos, basic car maintenance, language courses, carpentry, machine learning, keeping an aquarium, astronomy, and first aid for cats. And much of that material has been put there by enthusiasts with no other motivation than a desire to teach. That's real progress. Plato was a remarkable system and ahead of its time, but we've moved on.

Re:Wired article

[mfnickster]

Yeah, I get the essence of his complaint. Progress should mean better results, faster.

Two caveats might apply to that anecdote, though... one being the increase in availability of broadband after 1997, and the other being sheer number of users trying to access the same resources. I'm sure part of the reason Plato was fast was because it had relatively few users.

Still in my life

[rickb928]

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...

The Divine Comedy

[zioncat]

A preparation for road ahead.

A Quote Recommended By PLATO

[hcs_$reboot]

""640K ought to be enough for anybody"

Here is my problem with books

[mapkinase]

"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.

Re:A script-language based system.

[Doctor Memory]

If I recall correctly, the language PLATO was programmed in was called 'Tutor' and the individual programs were called 'lessons'.

Yup. And when DEC came out with their "Dimension Author Language" (quickly "Courseware Author Language" after a copyright complaint from AT&T), it was a pretty obvious copy of Tutor, right down to the dotted-indent scheme. I don't know if DEC had licensed Tutor from CDC and just tarted it up or if they just blatantly ripped it off, but it was nearly identical. We have to use special GiGi terminals (with faux-vector graphics) to work with it, Kind of fun, but it never got any traction and I think DEC dropped it within a couple of years. I think I still have my DAL manual somewhere, a second-generation photocopy with "COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL" stamped on every page.

Re:Recommendation for you: read about bump stocks

[Miser]

What the hell. Why are you posting this shit in multiple unrelated postings?

PLATO was a Big Deal in 1976

[AntronArgaiv]

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.

Back to the Future!

[zaft]

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).

PLATO and Microsoft are related

[Radyair]

First, I remember my father working on PLATO during the mid and late 70's, working with PDP's at University of Calgary, when I was a teenager. Of course my priorities then were playing Collosal Cave and Hammurabi on the PDP via teletype.

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.

Re:PLATO and Microsoft are related

[Radyair]

You are likely correct. No official visit or tour, as is the case with Jobs and Atkinson from Apple in 1979. I don't have my copy of the "Dealers in Lightning" at the moment but I thought I remembered Gates being offered a tour.

A year and a bit later, Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi from Xerox, where he'd been working since 1974 on WYSIWYG wordprocessor software. Simonyi was hired "to port the Alto's Bravo word processing software to other personal computer platforms under the name Microsoft Word." quote from http://appleinsider.com/articl...

This is perhaps less direct than the official visit...

Re:PLATO and Microsoft are related

[Radyair]

Vindicated. Phew.

Memory ! what it used to be.

That was a great read.