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

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.

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.

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?’”