In the seventies "Computer lib / dream machines" by Ted Nelson covered all the hottest computer systems in North America and included among them small talk and Plato and the logo Lab at MIT and graphics at Utah and a few others.
Xerox PARC researchers visited PLATO in 1972 and when they got back to Palo Alto they implemented just about everything they saw! App generator for pictures (SD Mode), paint (charset editor), bitmap /memory graphics display (plasma panel), multiple fonts and character sets, etc!
Friendly Orange Glow is unfortunately kind of overstuffed, meandering and political and focused excessively on bitzer, and misses so much of what PLATO/NovaNET were to so many people. Empire, avatar, oubliette, dnd, even moonwar, typomatic, Room B/C, night ops, pso, AIDS, TERM-test, cherry keyboard hoarding, stig bjorklund, the chem lab, the trs-80 running the satellite, lippold haken and the music room, bigfoot. I don't know if it's possible to write the PLATO story but FOG only skips across the surface.
I loved the avatar gameplay and the fact that it wasn't a "massively" multiplayer dungeon crawl, but rather something small enough that you knew most of the players. I'd trade a lot of the scale and graphics of modern gameplay for a return to the deliberate party based run of modestly updated avatar.
I sometimes think about bringing back avatar. I was one of the avatar ops, and came up with the idea of the afterlife, which was intended to improve its single player playability, but my version (navatar) was maybe a bit too sprawling and ambitious.
In case you take it up as a retirement project: what I'd love to see is an avatar builder's kit. Create the core engine, a basic level, monster, item, and class editor, and let people mod it. The basic party mechanics and att/def model could be standardized, but let people create their own game based on their own data. Create the hooks for people to add additional gameplay (ingredients, etc). Let people self-host.
Like you, I think about doing this every couple years. :)
I'm the author of The Friendly Orange Glow. I agree the book skips across the surface.
Some backstory: I originally proposed three volumes, each 1000 pages, to the publisher. They laughed and told me absolutely no. My thinking was, PLATO as a topic needs to be approached the way Robert Caro approached Lyndon Johnson. It's going to need multiple 1000-page books.
The publisher's reaction to my proposal was laughter. Their deal was, one book, 150,000 words, take it or leave it. So I took it: I'd spent 30+ years working on the project, had accumulated some 7 million words of interview transcripts, and had to get it out. In the end I delivered 229,000 words to the publisher which even then was the result of painful and severe chopping out of not only major sections but even entire chapters--all kinds of history got removed from the manuscript. (By the way, the final book came out to 209,000 words. Publisher was pissed that it wasn't 150,000. Editor, god bless him, stood by me, and we shipped 209,000 words. Publisher, I firmly believe, punished me by listing the book at a $40.00 list price, which is instant market death for a hardcover book in 2017. Powell's refused to let me do a book event because they don't allow $40 books to be presented by authors. It was sabotage, in my opinion. The publisher did atrocious, half-hearted work at publicity. They sent seven copies to people at the New York Times, which did nothing and never reviewed it. Nor did WPost. Nor did LA Times. Or SF Chronicle. Or Boston Globe, etc, etc. Only Wall Street Journal reviewed it, and they gave it a glowing review.
But here's the thing... anyone who knew and used PLATO is going to have their pet topics and focus areas, and complain about topics the book did include that are not favorites to them personally. Trust me, I've heard from thousands of PLATO people and everybody's happy and unhappy at the same time with what is in, and what is not in, the book. But I didn't write the book for PLATO people. I wrote it for the 8 billion people on Earth who'd never heard of PLATO and who were likely to never hear of it and its significance if something didn't get published that triggered PLATO to finally enter the conversation.
And look what's happening: Y Combinator's Hacker News is talking about PLATO! Ars of all things is talking about PLATO! In the past 5 years, Slate and WIRED (who always hated PLATO and refused to mention it) talked about PLATO. Verge and Motherboard covered it. PLATO is now a part of the conversation. Mission accomplished.
Finally: If you want to get a copy and read The Friendly Orange Glow, you can buy a hardcover from me directly by going to the Amazon site's hardcover page for the book, and selecting a "New" copy from seller Birdrock Books. That's me. I'm selling new copies for $11.11. Brand new, out of the box from the publisher. They come from me, with my signature on it.
I've read all four volumes of Caro's LBJ biography and praying he doesn't die before finishing the final one.
PLATO is not in that category, sorry. I was there (at UIUC). PLATO had an extremely small influence on the University, and especially on the Dept. of Computer Science. We never saw them at DCL.
According to the internet-history mailing list (which has essentially all the pioneers who are still alive), they had negligible influence on the Internet.
That's not to denigrate PLATO and what they did. It was the pinnacle of what you could do with a mainframe-and-terminals system. They could have had a much bigger influence on computers and society than they had.
Who cares about the Internet. (I'm on internet-history... it's a bunch of aging farts, very distinguished and nice aging farts but still, talking about TCP/IP and who did email and who did this and when did that happen etc. That's all swell. My book was not about the Internet. It was about PLATO and from a larger perspective, the rise of cyberculture of which "internet" only a portion.)
DCL like the Education dept at UIUC pooh-poohed PLATO from the outset. So it's no wonder they had a snooty attitude (and still do) about PLATO. MIT and Stanford had the same snooty attitue. PLATO was electrical engineering-driven, and science and humanities-driven. Very unusual for such a project, but that was the way it was.
Also, my book wasn't about the impact PLATO had on the University, but on cyberculture. The University politicians gladly swept PLATO under the carpet as soon as they could as the NCSA got big money in the 80s, and then the web took off in the 90s. Today it's like PLATO never existed at UIUC. A lot of that is due to decisions the PLATO lab took to stick to clearly antiquated design decisions and a reluctance to embrace client/server and distributed-computing designs. But they had to stick to old ways, because they had an immediate need to deploy, they weren't an ivory tower think tank like Xerox PARC dreaming up what the future might look like in 20 years. PLATO folks were dreaming up the then-present, and they shipped, like any good startup.
I interviewed a number of CS profs who worked at DCL in the 60s/70s/80s including H George Friedman, who was one of the few CS dept people who gave PLATO a try and built lessons for his programming students. Also, a full BASIC emulator was written. I think a FORTRAN was too. And definitely a LOGO environment. But as George told me, DCL looked down on CERL. DCL was an IBM shop. CERL was a CDC/CYBER shop. Oil and water.
And it's not about PLATO trying to "gain acceptance" at DCL. Other than George and maybe one or two other profs, nobody was interested. And CERL had its hands full with departments all over campus, and over 1000 terminals all over campus and as far away as Hawaii and Delaware, using the system.
I'm not going to engage anymore with you. I've said my piece and we're done. Good day to you.
It is when it's every single thread. That's when it gets weird.
As far as PLATO's impact on the world, I think it's underestimated and underappreciated. I don't give a shit about internet-history, I was one of the first few thousand people on the arpanet too. The actual authors of Mosaic were in CERL quite a bit. Usenet was already going on, but newsreaders (rn, trn, nn, etc.) were clearly influenced by the structure of notes and vice versa. dnd, oubliette and avatar were shamelessly ripped off multiple times and were the early foundation for graphical dungeon crawlers.
The idea that PLATO somehow needed to impact the CS department is kind of risible. Like having terminals in DCL was important? What did DCL ever do? PLATO impacted basically every chem, ceram, mech-e, comp-e, edu, edu-tech, geo, physics, etc., student at UIUC, not to mention U Chicago and places like Honolulu and ETH, for more than a decade. Thousands of us who grew up learning TUTOR as /jpr/cerl accounts have ended up having pretty good computer careers, all because of PLATO.
"every single thread" : it's in the news the last few days. I'll continue to share what I know, and your idea of "weirdness" is your own hangup. We can take it up with dang if you think there's something wrong with it.
"having terminals in DCL" : I wasn't aware PLATO invented terminals.
"I don't give a shit about internet-history" : OK, that categorizes you.
There were lots of ideas, and PLATO had some. I never used the word "irrelevant." However, they are not the lost city of Atlantis or the panspermia idea that suddenly explains everything. They were there; they had some success; they could have had much more and thus wouldn't need to be rediscovered now.
But PLATO did pretty much re-invent terminals in the 70's, with a touchscreen (infrared), flat-screen plasma display which later earned Don Bitzer and his two co-inventors an Emmy, was mentioned in an IETF IRC, and was also credited - together with PLATO itself - as inspiring some of Xerox Parc's work by Alan Kay, despite the big differences in technology used by the PLATO and Parc groups.
Then there's PLATO Notes, which inspired Ray Ozzie (who worked on PLATO at UIUC) to create Lotus Notes, which pretty much ruled the eMail/workflow world back in the day (Ozzie went on to introduce Azure while Microsoft's CTO/CSA). And while certainly far more primitive, the paradigm of students using PLATO V smart terminals to connect to CDC mainframes that served up courseware in the 1970's bears more than a passing resemblance to how kids in 2023 connect their laptops to Google's Cloud to serve up Khan Academy lessons.
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ECE alumni win Emmy for inventing the flat-panel plasma display 10/23/2002
https://ece.illinois.edu/newsroom/news/2541
In early October, three University of Illinois Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) alumni received an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Donald Bitzer (BS ’55, MS ’56, PhD ’60), H. Gene Slottow (PhD ’64), and Robert Willson (PhD ’66) received the prestigious award for inventing the flat-panel plasma display, the forerunner of today’s high-definition flat-panel television monitors.
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Internet Engineering Task Force RFC 600 - IETF November 1973
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc600.html
INTERFACING AN ILLINOIS PLASMA TERMINAL TO THE ARPANET
The PLATO IV System based at the University of Illinois at Urbana is a highly sophisticated and very powerful approach to Computer Aided Instruction. The PLATO IV system makes use of a plasma display terminal that is a unique device with capabilities not presently found on computer terminals. A number of ARPA supported projects intend to use the plasma terminal on local connection to computer resources or by long-distance connection to the PLATO IV System.
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Quora: Was the Plato IV system any influence on the Alto and PARC in general?
Alan Kay I am the Alan Kay in question.
Upvoted by Michael David Cobb Bowen, former P/A at Xerox (1982-1989) and Mark Decker, former DocuTech Analyst at Xerox (1979-1997)
https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Plato-IV-system-any-influence-...
We liked the Plato people a lot. Like the ARPA community and Xerox Parc they just invented and built everything they wanted that they couldn’t buy.
But they and Parc were on completely divergent paths. Plato ran on a 1000 terminal time-sharing system, and the displays were slow. So what they went after was very different (some of it was quite good, and some of it inspired us to do better with the vastly more powerful/person Alto).
Back to 1968. We were aware that flat screen displays were coming, but it was very exciting and inspiring to actually see a working one. This led to discussions about when the transistors in the Flex Machine could be put on the back of a flat screen display to make a tablet personal computer (the answer was in about 10 years we thought).
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Lotus Notes (aka HCL Domino)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino
"Notes has a history spanning more than 30 years. Its chief inspiration was PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley at the University of Illinois in 1973. In today's terminology, PLATO Notes supported user-created discussion groups, and it was part of the foundation for an online community which thrived for more than 20 years on the PLATO system. Ray Ozzie worked with PLATO while attending the University of Illinois in the 1970s. [...] the installed base of Lotus Notes has increased from an estimated 42 million seats in September 1998 to approximately 140 million cumulative licenses sold through 2008.
Why did you go the book route? It sounds like you spent a vast amount of effort to ship a book which fell radically short of your vision & available material, which made the most nugatory profit (and by any honest accounting was a big financial loss to you), and which didn't succeed at making a mark as a formal prestigious book. Wouldn't've it have worked a lot better to focus on a comprehensive website where you could put up all the material and solicit submissions?
What I wanted to do was a film documentary. What stopped me was, there was no footage! Meaning, nobody at CERL, the PLATO lab at U Illinois, had filmed everything. Nobody was a movie camera nerd. Nobody captured all the historical events, or even just day to day meetings / demos. It wasn't that kind of lab: everyone was insanely focused on the work at hand, and the culture was never one to expend any cycles on documenting how things went along the way. So there's a paper record, but very little in the way of footage. And if you do a documentary feature film you need TONS TONS TONS of video and film footage.
I did consider a website but ugh, it limits the audience. It doesn't get into bookstores. It doesn't get on college syllabi. You gotta do a book. So I did a book.
As for big financial loss, I knew going into the project I'd never make back what I put into the project over ~30 years. I didn't care; that wasn't the goal. The goal was to capture the story while the criticial mass of key PLATO people were still alive, and then put that into print so the world would know about PLATO before it all disappeared--believe me, the Silicon Valley tech industry would be perfectly happy if PLATO had disappeared. It messes so much with their mythology, after all! So that was a big motivator. The book has done fairly well, actually, and continues to sell in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook editions.
