IBM did a roadshow around 79-82 time frame in the UK and showed off plasma displays. They were very cool. Orange glow, very fast response they were built into the walls of an IBM mobile trailer hauled around the country drumming up business in the university towns. I didn't see one again until a very early Toshiba luggable in the early 90s.
PLATO seemed to me to kind of not lead anywhere solid. The field of computer aided instruction went on of course, NATO funded summer schools across Europe looking at it for decades. Maybe if you're in the field it has strong roots and a context. I worked alongside people in the space in that time and it felt like it wasn't living up to the promise.
That said, lots of things stem from it. All across the surface of things we do today. Mice, workstations, immersive experience, scripted interactions. I'm not sure I buy "email was born in PLATO"
I think it was a bit too far ahead of its time. By the mid-1980s when I encountered it, it felt dated; the communications increasingly felt slow. Attempts at commercializing it, and on running it on newer hardware didn't really go very far.
There were implementations of TUTOR for MS-DOS as well, with TenCORE being one that I saw. Early in my programming career, I came across it when we were rewriting a financial planner that was originally written in it into C. I was flabbergasted when my Lotus 1-2-3 importer was twenty times faster then the original. On reflection, I realized that TenCORE so completely imitated its CDC Cyber heritage that it used Cyber floating-point format for its math, and had to emulate every math operation.
I was assigned a Compaq portable with a plasma screen in the early 1990s at my first job. "Portable" was relative to the era; the thing was the size of a small suitcase.
PLATO seemed to me to kind of not lead anywhere solid. The field of computer aided instruction went on of course, NATO funded summer schools across Europe looking at it for decades. Maybe if you're in the field it has strong roots and a context. I worked alongside people in the space in that time and it felt like it wasn't living up to the promise.
That said, lots of things stem from it. All across the surface of things we do today. Mice, workstations, immersive experience, scripted interactions. I'm not sure I buy "email was born in PLATO"