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The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
The remarkable untold story of PLATO, the computer program and platform created in the 1960s, that marked the true beginning of cyberculture--a book that will rewrite the history of computing and the Internet
Here is the story of the brilliant, eccentric designers, developers, and denizens (often teenagers and twentysomethings) of the PLATO system, a computer network so far ahead of its time, and with a list of hardware and software innovations so long, that it's almost inconceivable that it actually existed--and existed so long ago--only to fade almost entirely from public view. The many thousands of people who used the system have held on to the PLATO ideas throughout their careers, influencing countless technological products and programs: from flat-panel wall TVs and touch-sensitive screens to chat rooms, instant messaging, screen savers, multiplayer games, flight simulators, crowdsourcing, interactive fiction, emoticons, and e-learning. Fascinating, first hand, and revelatory, The Friendly Orange Glow makes clear that the work of PLATO practitioners has profoundly shaped the computer industry from its inception to our very moment.
This book is as much the biography of a vision as it is the story of the people behind PLATO. Every technology story--whether it's about the steam engine, airplane, telephone, Model T, or more recently, Apple, Google, and Tesla electric car--has at its core a vision. It is the immutable nature of technology, and technology visions, to run full life cycles, from cradle to grave. PLATO's story is no different. Like all technology visions, PLATO grew outdated and was disrupted by competing visions. The Friendly Orange Glow is a revelatory paradigm for our technological age.
Here is the story of the brilliant, eccentric designers, developers, and denizens (often teenagers and twentysomethings) of the PLATO system, a computer network so far ahead of its time, and with a list of hardware and software innovations so long, that it's almost inconceivable that it actually existed--and existed so long ago--only to fade almost entirely from public view. The many thousands of people who used the system have held on to the PLATO ideas throughout their careers, influencing countless technological products and programs: from flat-panel wall TVs and touch-sensitive screens to chat rooms, instant messaging, screen savers, multiplayer games, flight simulators, crowdsourcing, interactive fiction, emoticons, and e-learning. Fascinating, first hand, and revelatory, The Friendly Orange Glow makes clear that the work of PLATO practitioners has profoundly shaped the computer industry from its inception to our very moment.
This book is as much the biography of a vision as it is the story of the people behind PLATO. Every technology story--whether it's about the steam engine, airplane, telephone, Model T, or more recently, Apple, Google, and Tesla electric car--has at its core a vision. It is the immutable nature of technology, and technology visions, to run full life cycles, from cradle to grave. PLATO's story is no different. Like all technology visions, PLATO grew outdated and was disrupted by competing visions. The Friendly Orange Glow is a revelatory paradigm for our technological age.
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First published November 14, 2017
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November 17, 2017
I must admit that came into this book a little wary. I could tell from the introduction that Brian Dear has a chip on his shoulder about UIUC and the midwest in general being underappreciated for their technical advancements, and it's a major complaint you'll hear anytime you get a tour of the engineering or related departments at UI. I was a little afraid of getting into this too-long opus of passion, a work of years that would be a little like getting cornered at the party by the guy who's obsessed with gaming and wants to tell you the keyboard shortcuts he's discovered. And I wasn't all that wrong. But despite the chip on the shoulder and the obsession, the core of this book was pretty endearing (not an author pun) and entertaining. The heart of the book is a charming tale of hackers and gamers coming together on an early network, a testimony to the recognizable but remarkably early evolution of a connected community. Dear was a member of this community himself and is an unabashed fanboy.
There are significant weaknesses. The opening section on the origin of Plato is a bit precious, by an author that is a little too amazed by his subject and is trying a little too hard to impress us. But it is explained clearly, which is a plus. The closing 100 pages or so have to explain why Plato has been forgotten, how it was mishandled and petered out, and he's a little bitter. It was a bit rough getting through those sections and each could have been written with greater brevity.
But the middle section, describing the culture and evolution of Plato, is a fun and informing read. And the author certainly did his homework. Lots and lots of homework, and perhaps too much of it got into the book, but I definitely learned something worth knowing. That the 'where are they now..' section at the end was super interesting, tracing the tradition of Plato into other technologies of the 1990s.
I got a copy to review from First to Read.
There are significant weaknesses. The opening section on the origin of Plato is a bit precious, by an author that is a little too amazed by his subject and is trying a little too hard to impress us. But it is explained clearly, which is a plus. The closing 100 pages or so have to explain why Plato has been forgotten, how it was mishandled and petered out, and he's a little bitter. It was a bit rough getting through those sections and each could have been written with greater brevity.
But the middle section, describing the culture and evolution of Plato, is a fun and informing read. And the author certainly did his homework. Lots and lots of homework, and perhaps too much of it got into the book, but I definitely learned something worth knowing. That the 'where are they now..' section at the end was super interesting, tracing the tradition of Plato into other technologies of the 1990s.
I got a copy to review from First to Read.
December 30, 2017
This book is a tour de force as it sweeps through 25 years of missing computing history. It adroitly weaves the complex technical, personal and business story of PLATO. It's a compelling narrative, held together by great vignettes of the key players who developed the system, software and applications.
Plato was a mainframe system (originally with custom terminals), built to provide computer-based education, but its authoring system was used to build an entire ecosystem way beyond its designer's original intent - multi-user games, chat rooms, email, online news and more. All appearing ten to twenty years before these ideas were reinvented as commercial online systems or on desktop computers.
A good book is one you can't put down. A great book is one that raises more questions beyond the books subject. This is one of the great ones. CDC buying Plato was one of the corporate slow-motion train wrecks that is still painful to read. (The story of CDC itself is even a larger disaster.) A large company trying to buy the output of an R&D lab and productize its output is still fraught with difficulties even in the 21st century. As I read, I wondered what if CERL and Plato had been at Stanford rather than U of I in the late 1970's? Would sitting in the middle of an entrepreneurial ecosystem have spurred more spinouts. And would those spinouts have been better managed surrounded by venture capitalists and other experienced entrepreneurs?
It also makes me think of the other still-born computer entrepreneurial cluster in the Midwest - Minneapolis. It was the home of ERA, CDC, Cray, ETA, and Honeywell. In spite of all that history the area failed to attract entrepreneurs, startups and capital at scale. (Yet Minneapolis still has a healthy medical device ecosystem built around Medtronic.)
Were the failures of these two Midwest clusters similar? Did they not catch fire from the lack of risk capital (venture and angel?) Not understanding the difference between small business, startups and corporate management? Lack of an ecosystem that was a magnet for attracting non-academic risk-taking talent? Lack of technical and business press that made their innovations and environment known to the rest of the country?
As great as the book is there was one down side that almost made me stop reading it - and therefore the four stars. At least for me, the extremely detailed recounting of every game on the system and game developer, while great for the audience of readers who knew Plato, bogged down the narrative. A good editor could have made the point of how revolutionary these gaming innovations were, but could have shortened this section by at least 20 pages.
But I'm glad I continued because this was a wonderful and enlightening piece of computing history.
Kudos to the author.
Plato was a mainframe system (originally with custom terminals), built to provide computer-based education, but its authoring system was used to build an entire ecosystem way beyond its designer's original intent - multi-user games, chat rooms, email, online news and more. All appearing ten to twenty years before these ideas were reinvented as commercial online systems or on desktop computers.
A good book is one you can't put down. A great book is one that raises more questions beyond the books subject. This is one of the great ones. CDC buying Plato was one of the corporate slow-motion train wrecks that is still painful to read. (The story of CDC itself is even a larger disaster.) A large company trying to buy the output of an R&D lab and productize its output is still fraught with difficulties even in the 21st century. As I read, I wondered what if CERL and Plato had been at Stanford rather than U of I in the late 1970's? Would sitting in the middle of an entrepreneurial ecosystem have spurred more spinouts. And would those spinouts have been better managed surrounded by venture capitalists and other experienced entrepreneurs?
It also makes me think of the other still-born computer entrepreneurial cluster in the Midwest - Minneapolis. It was the home of ERA, CDC, Cray, ETA, and Honeywell. In spite of all that history the area failed to attract entrepreneurs, startups and capital at scale. (Yet Minneapolis still has a healthy medical device ecosystem built around Medtronic.)
Were the failures of these two Midwest clusters similar? Did they not catch fire from the lack of risk capital (venture and angel?) Not understanding the difference between small business, startups and corporate management? Lack of an ecosystem that was a magnet for attracting non-academic risk-taking talent? Lack of technical and business press that made their innovations and environment known to the rest of the country?
As great as the book is there was one down side that almost made me stop reading it - and therefore the four stars. At least for me, the extremely detailed recounting of every game on the system and game developer, while great for the audience of readers who knew Plato, bogged down the narrative. A good editor could have made the point of how revolutionary these gaming innovations were, but could have shortened this section by at least 20 pages.
But I'm glad I continued because this was a wonderful and enlightening piece of computing history.
Kudos to the author.
April 7, 2022
quite verbose- good book though if you're interested in computing history
November 10, 2018
Most people have never heard of PLATO. But they're familiar with all manner of things which were developed on PLATO.
It was, originally, conceived as a way to provide Computer Aided Instruction (CAI). The idea was that, while a human teacher has little time to devote to one-on-one instruction with a student, a computer is infinitely patient. It can wait for several minutes while the student ponders something. As such, what was needed were terminals which could provide useful textual and graphical presentation.
Back then, most computers were, at best, text-based with no graphical capabilities. PCs didn't exist. We're talking late 1960s, early 1970s. Many computers, being used in universities of that era, were still using punched cards.
University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign (UIUC) is the setting for most of this. They started by developing terminals which could connect to a mainframe (originally the ILLIAC and later Control Data mainframes) and display various kinds of video information (text and graphical) as well as taking inputs from various types of keyboards. The idea was that you could develop "courseware" for this platform which would present information to a student (one-on-one) and then quiz them on various things, adjusting the presentation based on their responses. Instead of giving students a test, then giving them the results days later (too much gap to be useful feedback), this system could respond on a second-by-second basis, helping students to actually LEARN stuff, changing the presentation and providing useful stats to the courseware authors, so that they could improve the course.
They wanted a graphical display . The CRTs of the era would need significant amounts of video RAM to drive them. Memory was about $2 / bit back then (not byte, kilobyte or megabyte; $2 per BIT). A 512 x 512 display (which they were targeting) would need about a quarter million bits of memory. You can do the math on that. They ended up developing plasma display tech AND making a way for the circuitry to query the display (such that the display could also work as memory). People who bought plasma TVs and such, back in the 1990s and later, were using a variation on the tech they developed. UIUC made a ton of money off the patents for that.
The color they chose for their display was a yellowish orange shade (hence the book's title). It had a remarkable ability to draw people in; indeed, much of the color found in a campfire is this, particular shade. They built their 512 x 512 graphical display, fitted it with a touchscreen and used it as the PLATO IV terminal (the 4th gen of their design). It also featured a full keyboard, touchscreen and, among other things, a microfiche reader. Various other things could be added (a polyphonic music module, called a Gooch box, and a somewhat-limited voice-synthesizer).
Various demos were done with this, getting money from the National Science Foundation and from Congress. In the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, Congress was willing to spend money on ANYTHING which looked like it might help teach STEM subjects (although that term wouldn't appear until later). UIUC got a pile of money from both and got to work rolling out the systems.
Magnavox made the terminals. They were pricey (over $5k each, in 1973; you could buy a new car for less). As such, only the wealthy ever had their own terminals. But universities and government-funded programs in high schools and prisons got plenty of them.
Yes, they were a significant step forward in teaching, once some bugs had been ironed out in the authoring tools. But they were achieving real successes as early as 1974. Along the way, various high school and college students were playing with it and came up with some other features.
First came "notesfiles," which are a bit like online forums. You could have discussions with other people on various subjects (and, being a college, no subject was off-limits; Watergate and "alternative lifestyles" were both, heavily discussed). You could post questions to these and have answers appear from other people within minutes, sometimes seconds.
They also invented TERM-talk, which was real-time chat. And I do mean real-time. Most IM clients I've used, you type an entire sentence, or at least a phrase, send that and either start the next sentence / phrase or wait for a response. With TERM-talk, you could see how fast and accurately people could type because individual characters were coming down the line, including backspace as they wiped out their typos and corrected them. People met, fell in love and subsequently got married, having "met" through this channel. Other people fell in love, met and discovered that, while they got along well online, they were thoroughly NOT compatible in person.
VNC / RDP anyone? They came up with a "monitor mode" such that you could see another user's terminal. If you were developing some courseware and couldn't get something to work, you could chat with a more experienced dev, they could "monitor" your screen, scroll around if needed, and either tell you what to do or fix it themselves. Both of you could see the same screen at the same time. But you had to request that they do so; there was no provision for spying on someone else's screen without their knowledge / permission.
Of course, they had email. IBM mainframes with green-screen terminals had email.
And since people could dial into systems from elsewhere (as far away as University of Delaware and University of Hawaii), you could communicate with people across multiple timezones without ever running up a long-distance phone bill.
All in 1974. The Apple 2 didn't arrive until 1977.
And then, there were the games.
Dungeon crawlers (including massively multi-player, text-based and, not long after, graphical). First-person shooters. Combat flight simulation. FreeCell solitaire. Mahjongg. And the big baddie of them all: Empire. While Star Trek-themed, this was a multiplayer, graphical game involving traveling in your starship, visiting planets, shooting bad guys (usually teams of other players), establishing trade, making money and upgrading your starship. Sound familiar? At one point, the authors (mostly students an University of Iowa, connected to UIUC over a 1200 baud modems) had put in an "Easter Egg," involving the planet killer from Star Trek's "The Doomsday Machine" episode. After much discussion in the line chat, players put their usual team alliances aside and lined up, one after another, feeding their starships to the "orange carrot," (how the planet killer appeared on their orange plasma displays), trying to time a reactor overload JUST RIGHT to kill it off. Once it was killed off, their old allegiances returned and everyone went back to fighting. It made a couple more appearances but, each time, the players knew how to kill it and killed it off faster and faster until the developers decided it wasn't a challenge anymore and remove it.
Numerous college (and high school) students flunked out because they'd spend too many hours gaming on the system, not enough hours sleeping and studying. All kinds of things were done to access terminals "after hours," including removing sections of wall and hiding behind it until the computer lab was shut down and locked for the night and picking various locks. The games, in particular, were addictive. And because this was a largely open-source environment (again, the term didn't exist until later), everyone could see how people did stuff, everyone could learn and new features were arriving daily.
Early in the system's development, a group was developing a library which compiler-based languages (such as FORTRAN) could use to write courseware. A high school student came up with an interpreter which was much easier to use. The library developers (all college students, working on related degrees) approached the head of the PLATO project (Don Bitzer) and demanded that he tell this student to stop. He was wasting his time. Worse, if he succeeded, their "official" development would go unused. Don refused to intervene; he was a firm believer that the better solution would win out and he was not opposed to people developing competing products and letting them duke it out in "the marketplace of ideas." Incidentally, the insufferable student student succeeded with his interpreter (called TUTOR) and grew up to become one of the power players in PLATO.
The managers of the system largely took a blind eye to the gaming. It wasn't "officially" part of their mission but ... it was extremely good at flushing out security holes and other flaws in the system. It was not uncommon for a new feature to appear (after hours), causing the mainframe to crash (repeatedly) during the night-time gaming sessions. This would drive the sysadmins and system developers nuts but ... they'd have the problem figured out and fixed before "official" hours began the next morning and the overall system improved rapidly because of it.
Eventually, different universities (and companies) had their own mainframe and hundreds of terminals. Eventually, said mainframes were interconnected so that notesfiles, TERM-talk and software could migrate between the various, networked systems. It was a proto-Internet. Back when "Charlie's Angels" first went on the air.
As went Control Data's fortunes, so went PLATO's. When Control Data Corp peaked and started falling apart in the 1980s (because capable microcomputers had arrived and CDC REFUSED to acknowledge what that meant for the market), PLATO went into decline. It evolved into NovaNET, using client software running on PCs (instead of pricey terminals), and finally shutdown entirely in 2015.
Email. Chat. Forums. Interactive multimedia (including graphics, voice and music). Emojis (animated ones, even). Multi-player online games. The exchange of virtual items (found / achieved in various games) for real money. ALL of this was happening in the mid-1970s. Before the PC. But you had to live / go to school "in the cornfields" (Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Indiana were main sites for this) to be exposed to it. MIT and Stanford decided, early on, that they simply weren't interested and they never changed. Stanford was trying to develop a competing system; it never went as far as PLATO.
These days, when you look at Udacity and Coursera, they're frequently trying to create courseware and fighting with problems which PLATO fought with, and defeated, decades ago. But the founders come from MIT and Stanford; they never heard of PLATO, so they're incapable of learning lessons from that system.
At 500+ pages, this book is not light reading. But it's an enjoyable, engaging read. And I gained tremendous insight into the origin of many things which are, usually, attributed to the Internet. Sorry to disappoint but ... no, people were using these features, getting addicted to an online world, LONG before public access to the Internet.
It was, originally, conceived as a way to provide Computer Aided Instruction (CAI). The idea was that, while a human teacher has little time to devote to one-on-one instruction with a student, a computer is infinitely patient. It can wait for several minutes while the student ponders something. As such, what was needed were terminals which could provide useful textual and graphical presentation.
Back then, most computers were, at best, text-based with no graphical capabilities. PCs didn't exist. We're talking late 1960s, early 1970s. Many computers, being used in universities of that era, were still using punched cards.
University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign (UIUC) is the setting for most of this. They started by developing terminals which could connect to a mainframe (originally the ILLIAC and later Control Data mainframes) and display various kinds of video information (text and graphical) as well as taking inputs from various types of keyboards. The idea was that you could develop "courseware" for this platform which would present information to a student (one-on-one) and then quiz them on various things, adjusting the presentation based on their responses. Instead of giving students a test, then giving them the results days later (too much gap to be useful feedback), this system could respond on a second-by-second basis, helping students to actually LEARN stuff, changing the presentation and providing useful stats to the courseware authors, so that they could improve the course.
They wanted a graphical display . The CRTs of the era would need significant amounts of video RAM to drive them. Memory was about $2 / bit back then (not byte, kilobyte or megabyte; $2 per BIT). A 512 x 512 display (which they were targeting) would need about a quarter million bits of memory. You can do the math on that. They ended up developing plasma display tech AND making a way for the circuitry to query the display (such that the display could also work as memory). People who bought plasma TVs and such, back in the 1990s and later, were using a variation on the tech they developed. UIUC made a ton of money off the patents for that.
The color they chose for their display was a yellowish orange shade (hence the book's title). It had a remarkable ability to draw people in; indeed, much of the color found in a campfire is this, particular shade. They built their 512 x 512 graphical display, fitted it with a touchscreen and used it as the PLATO IV terminal (the 4th gen of their design). It also featured a full keyboard, touchscreen and, among other things, a microfiche reader. Various other things could be added (a polyphonic music module, called a Gooch box, and a somewhat-limited voice-synthesizer).
Various demos were done with this, getting money from the National Science Foundation and from Congress. In the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, Congress was willing to spend money on ANYTHING which looked like it might help teach STEM subjects (although that term wouldn't appear until later). UIUC got a pile of money from both and got to work rolling out the systems.
Magnavox made the terminals. They were pricey (over $5k each, in 1973; you could buy a new car for less). As such, only the wealthy ever had their own terminals. But universities and government-funded programs in high schools and prisons got plenty of them.
Yes, they were a significant step forward in teaching, once some bugs had been ironed out in the authoring tools. But they were achieving real successes as early as 1974. Along the way, various high school and college students were playing with it and came up with some other features.
First came "notesfiles," which are a bit like online forums. You could have discussions with other people on various subjects (and, being a college, no subject was off-limits; Watergate and "alternative lifestyles" were both, heavily discussed). You could post questions to these and have answers appear from other people within minutes, sometimes seconds.
They also invented TERM-talk, which was real-time chat. And I do mean real-time. Most IM clients I've used, you type an entire sentence, or at least a phrase, send that and either start the next sentence / phrase or wait for a response. With TERM-talk, you could see how fast and accurately people could type because individual characters were coming down the line, including backspace as they wiped out their typos and corrected them. People met, fell in love and subsequently got married, having "met" through this channel. Other people fell in love, met and discovered that, while they got along well online, they were thoroughly NOT compatible in person.
VNC / RDP anyone? They came up with a "monitor mode" such that you could see another user's terminal. If you were developing some courseware and couldn't get something to work, you could chat with a more experienced dev, they could "monitor" your screen, scroll around if needed, and either tell you what to do or fix it themselves. Both of you could see the same screen at the same time. But you had to request that they do so; there was no provision for spying on someone else's screen without their knowledge / permission.
Of course, they had email. IBM mainframes with green-screen terminals had email.
And since people could dial into systems from elsewhere (as far away as University of Delaware and University of Hawaii), you could communicate with people across multiple timezones without ever running up a long-distance phone bill.
All in 1974. The Apple 2 didn't arrive until 1977.
And then, there were the games.
Dungeon crawlers (including massively multi-player, text-based and, not long after, graphical). First-person shooters. Combat flight simulation. FreeCell solitaire. Mahjongg. And the big baddie of them all: Empire. While Star Trek-themed, this was a multiplayer, graphical game involving traveling in your starship, visiting planets, shooting bad guys (usually teams of other players), establishing trade, making money and upgrading your starship. Sound familiar? At one point, the authors (mostly students an University of Iowa, connected to UIUC over a 1200 baud modems) had put in an "Easter Egg," involving the planet killer from Star Trek's "The Doomsday Machine" episode. After much discussion in the line chat, players put their usual team alliances aside and lined up, one after another, feeding their starships to the "orange carrot," (how the planet killer appeared on their orange plasma displays), trying to time a reactor overload JUST RIGHT to kill it off. Once it was killed off, their old allegiances returned and everyone went back to fighting. It made a couple more appearances but, each time, the players knew how to kill it and killed it off faster and faster until the developers decided it wasn't a challenge anymore and remove it.
Numerous college (and high school) students flunked out because they'd spend too many hours gaming on the system, not enough hours sleeping and studying. All kinds of things were done to access terminals "after hours," including removing sections of wall and hiding behind it until the computer lab was shut down and locked for the night and picking various locks. The games, in particular, were addictive. And because this was a largely open-source environment (again, the term didn't exist until later), everyone could see how people did stuff, everyone could learn and new features were arriving daily.
Early in the system's development, a group was developing a library which compiler-based languages (such as FORTRAN) could use to write courseware. A high school student came up with an interpreter which was much easier to use. The library developers (all college students, working on related degrees) approached the head of the PLATO project (Don Bitzer) and demanded that he tell this student to stop. He was wasting his time. Worse, if he succeeded, their "official" development would go unused. Don refused to intervene; he was a firm believer that the better solution would win out and he was not opposed to people developing competing products and letting them duke it out in "the marketplace of ideas." Incidentally, the insufferable student student succeeded with his interpreter (called TUTOR) and grew up to become one of the power players in PLATO.
The managers of the system largely took a blind eye to the gaming. It wasn't "officially" part of their mission but ... it was extremely good at flushing out security holes and other flaws in the system. It was not uncommon for a new feature to appear (after hours), causing the mainframe to crash (repeatedly) during the night-time gaming sessions. This would drive the sysadmins and system developers nuts but ... they'd have the problem figured out and fixed before "official" hours began the next morning and the overall system improved rapidly because of it.
Eventually, different universities (and companies) had their own mainframe and hundreds of terminals. Eventually, said mainframes were interconnected so that notesfiles, TERM-talk and software could migrate between the various, networked systems. It was a proto-Internet. Back when "Charlie's Angels" first went on the air.
As went Control Data's fortunes, so went PLATO's. When Control Data Corp peaked and started falling apart in the 1980s (because capable microcomputers had arrived and CDC REFUSED to acknowledge what that meant for the market), PLATO went into decline. It evolved into NovaNET, using client software running on PCs (instead of pricey terminals), and finally shutdown entirely in 2015.
Email. Chat. Forums. Interactive multimedia (including graphics, voice and music). Emojis (animated ones, even). Multi-player online games. The exchange of virtual items (found / achieved in various games) for real money. ALL of this was happening in the mid-1970s. Before the PC. But you had to live / go to school "in the cornfields" (Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Indiana were main sites for this) to be exposed to it. MIT and Stanford decided, early on, that they simply weren't interested and they never changed. Stanford was trying to develop a competing system; it never went as far as PLATO.
These days, when you look at Udacity and Coursera, they're frequently trying to create courseware and fighting with problems which PLATO fought with, and defeated, decades ago. But the founders come from MIT and Stanford; they never heard of PLATO, so they're incapable of learning lessons from that system.
At 500+ pages, this book is not light reading. But it's an enjoyable, engaging read. And I gained tremendous insight into the origin of many things which are, usually, attributed to the Internet. Sorry to disappoint but ... no, people were using these features, getting addicted to an online world, LONG before public access to the Internet.
February 3, 2019
A compelling, deep, & eminently readable history of a glaring blindspot in much of popular computer history. PLATO pops up, Forrest Gump-like, in the background of almost every computer history story we know that overlaps with its nearly six decade lifespan -- inspiring the Dynabook, inspiring Lotus Notes, inspiring some of Ted Nelson's thoughts about interactive media in Computer Lib / Dream Machines, and hosting the prototypes for some of the most popular computer games of the 80s and 90s -- but this is the first time I've seen it given its full context, as an interesting story in its own right, and I feel like I've had part of my sense of computing history undergo percussive maintenance. In retrospect, *of course* some project must have been the missing link between all these things.
This story is also about how PLATO encountered & addressed difficulties associated with being a platform for popular online communities -- difficulties that popped up again in usenet, again in BBSes, and again in email, and again in forums, and again in blogging & social networking. Since we largely haven't figured out the answers to those problems, it's useful to have more data points.
For a general-audience book, this work is surprisingly informative about technical aspects of the system -- particularly when technical decisions interacted with UX concerns. So, from a pure history-of-tech perspective, it's interesting on its own. PLATO seems to be part of a lineage of card-based interfaces -- something common (and extremely influential within pre-web hypertext) but rarely documented in the general press.
Dear does a lot to contextualize the time period & the political & economic pressures -- putting into perspective who the other players were, what they did, and why, down to the details of infighting between different paradigms in the late-1950s ed-tech space. I rarely see that level of detail in tech histories with regard to funding sources & their justifications.
Highly recommended for anyone with even a passing interest in computing history. You don't need a general background in it, but if you have one, the story is even more impressive.
This story is also about how PLATO encountered & addressed difficulties associated with being a platform for popular online communities -- difficulties that popped up again in usenet, again in BBSes, and again in email, and again in forums, and again in blogging & social networking. Since we largely haven't figured out the answers to those problems, it's useful to have more data points.
For a general-audience book, this work is surprisingly informative about technical aspects of the system -- particularly when technical decisions interacted with UX concerns. So, from a pure history-of-tech perspective, it's interesting on its own. PLATO seems to be part of a lineage of card-based interfaces -- something common (and extremely influential within pre-web hypertext) but rarely documented in the general press.
Dear does a lot to contextualize the time period & the political & economic pressures -- putting into perspective who the other players were, what they did, and why, down to the details of infighting between different paradigms in the late-1950s ed-tech space. I rarely see that level of detail in tech histories with regard to funding sources & their justifications.
Highly recommended for anyone with even a passing interest in computing history. You don't need a general background in it, but if you have one, the story is even more impressive.
December 21, 2018
Five star books get that high ranking from me when they deliver an emotional connection. Sometimes it is because of a topic covered, at times it is the strength of the writing that forges that connection. Here, it is a linkage between a topic of great, career-building interest to me, computer history, with my own history. With an author that can mix these things together, creating interesting and varied stories along the way, you have a great book. I found “The Friendly Orange Glow” to be a great book, although I expect that opinion will match that of a very small cadre of fans. This book tells the story of the Plato system, used principally for education but later morphing into one of the first interconnected systems for electronic communications and gaming. Most of the book covers the creation of the system and its growth, mostly in the 60s and 70s. My personal connection was as a gamer in the early 80s at the home base for Plato, the University of Illinois’ CERL. I spent many nights (you could only play games after 10pm) in the CERL Plato classroom among the glowing orange touchscreens of the Plato system. Many early games are described in the book, from the perspectives of the game authors as well the players. I haven’t thought about these games in decades but this really brought back intense memories. I was interested to learn that the Plato system represented many developments that later became commonplace on the internet, including message boards, instant messaging, notes groups, shared screens, and the like. Authors on Plato went on to create popular computer games like Flight Simulator and Mah Jong and ubiquitous applications like Lotus Notes. This history-making computer system was enabled through a very open environment with try-anything leaders, always willing to do a demo. Much of the early system work was accomplished by interesting kids from the neighboring Uni High in the goings on, and later hiring them. The book follows the Plato system through its initial development at CERL and other colleges, through the years that CDC attempted to sell it around the world, and to its demise.
This is a great book for a detailed telling of the history of this computer system. The author provides stories of many of the players on the team building and selling Plato, and developing applications. This would be a good business book for those looking for an example of open door recruitment, as well as the use of non-traditional employees. And it provides a detailed example of what can go wrong in moving a research project to commercialization. I found the commercialization section the least interesting parts, though mainly because they were mostly about missed opportunities. Overall, an excellent computer history.
“The Friendly Orange Glow” was written to counter the lack of credit that the Midwest, in particular Illinois, gets in computer history. Here the Plato system gets credit for many innovations later popularized by various applications over the Internet. This is the second book I’ve perused that gave credit to the Midwest, and Illinois, for major advances in computers. The inventor of the computer says that he first wrote down his description of a computer in a bar in Rock Island, Illinois. Maybe there’s something in the water.
This is a great book for a detailed telling of the history of this computer system. The author provides stories of many of the players on the team building and selling Plato, and developing applications. This would be a good business book for those looking for an example of open door recruitment, as well as the use of non-traditional employees. And it provides a detailed example of what can go wrong in moving a research project to commercialization. I found the commercialization section the least interesting parts, though mainly because they were mostly about missed opportunities. Overall, an excellent computer history.
“The Friendly Orange Glow” was written to counter the lack of credit that the Midwest, in particular Illinois, gets in computer history. Here the Plato system gets credit for many innovations later popularized by various applications over the Internet. This is the second book I’ve perused that gave credit to the Midwest, and Illinois, for major advances in computers. The inventor of the computer says that he first wrote down his description of a computer in a bar in Rock Island, Illinois. Maybe there’s something in the water.
April 9, 2018
It feels like this took me a million years to read, but I'm glad I stuck with it. Dense with information, it really blew my mind how much PLATO did before anyone else, and the community it built among its users, both in Champaign-Urbana and around the world. I'm probably biased for this since I'm currently a UIUC graduate student and barely a stone's throw away from such monuments to PLATO like the Power House and CSL, but I'd highly recommend this to anyone interested in computing history and the connective power of computers and a bunch of programming nerds sitting around monitors late at night, drinking Mountain Dew and playing Airfight. Also, it's hard to hate a book which features a cameo from Leonard Nimoy himself.
August 26, 2019
Brian Dear The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture is one of the most knowledgeable and humane books I've read about the history of computing, here, about the PLATO system. I rarely do this, but I recommend The Friendly Orange Glow highly and without reserves, and have added it to my favorite list and given it five out of five stars. I'm curious how this review (and book) will age.
(Disclaimer: I am both a Ph.D. and a full Professor in the technical field of distributed (multimedia) systems, to which the PLATO system belongs. I have been waiting for this book for years. I'm glad I read it. I'm glad it was written.)
All, in short:
The content covers the longest-lived success you've probably never heard about, the PLATO education system, which during its peak lasting over a decade established the principles of streaming multimedia, online education, online gaming, social networking, and a bunch of technologies we're still trying to improve. Mostly between the 1950s and the 1980s, with a peak in the middle and a rapid descent afterwards. Then partially forgotten and rediscovered. In the end, PLATO had real, passionate users, some still online after over four decades.
Like Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe, this reads like a thorough, honest journalistic effort, with smarts. Like Robert A. Caro's now-tetralogy, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, it is also a long-term research project by an extremely curious and knowledgeable investigator.
Now, the remainder of my review, likely more detailed than I intended, but not detailed and polished enough to get all the stuff right:
Structural and stylistic overview:
The Friendly Orange Glow is structured in three parts encompassing twenty-seven chapters. It's about 600 pages of core content, excluding references, but it's one of those books where length does not matter or it's even a plus. The quality of the writing is very high, which to me comes as a surprise. For me, books themed on computer history tend to either be too sensationalist or personality-cult-driven-, or very dry. This one has excellent balance.
Content overview:
In Part I, The Automated Teacher, Brian Dear follows the evolution of ths system in its roughly first 10 years, from the basic vision of Alpert et al. in the 1950s, through Bitzer's first diagram and first flimsy TV-based incarnation in (Sep) 1960, to the CDC 1604 supercomputer(s) powering the backend of PLATO II for up to 32 terminals in 1962-63, to PLATO III's 20 real users (time-sharing) and the CATO lecture compiler in 1967-69, to PLATO IV and its plasma display (the orange glow) and up to 4,096 connections (by the new, CDC CYBER supercomputer) and music interface and what-not.
In Part II, The Fun They Had, the shift to software around the early to mid-1970s leads to real applications that people beyond compsci and general education would enjoy, and practically to the premises of online digital presence and long-range large-scale communication (tens to hundreds to thousands of miles, between thousands of people, although not all online at concurrently) - this is pompous for chat, instant messaging (character by character woth low latency, something we don't have even now), forums, collective notes, fancy emojis and animated text (editable, so well beyond what ASCII-art brought to the scene), online voting, political activism and surveys, online newspapers, blogs, etc. etc. etc. And there were online games! Online strategy and role-playing and first-person-shooter and flight sim and Elite and... all MMOs... and as addictive as we know them to be today. Nothing was as polished as you see it now, but this was say 1975 so almost 45 years ago!
There's also a very nice parallel to Tom Wolfe's Ziggurat - where competitors try to climb, at the detriment of others - and a deep analysis of the social network forming around PLATO, by someone who's actually been there long-term, and then spent another 25 years interviewing the people who were there. Combined with material extracted from the original notes written by these and others in the 1970s and 1980s, it's the right stuff with only a little positive bias - after all, the author likes PLATO and its people.
In Part III, Getting to Scale, there's the question of (business) scale, and PLATO will end up a product and a pawn in the hands of fumbling CDC leadership. We learn about the many deployments of PLATO, about a grand vision to scale it to a million terminals (CDC), about another to make it a general multimedia and communication platform (Bitzer and his lab CERL), and finally about how these visions bumped into the reality walls of technology and politics and money. In the last chapter in this part, Leaving the Nest, we hear about the (major) contributions to the industry at-large of the former project and tech leads from PLATO, now deploying their talents elsewhere; there's so much!
The Epilogue depicts the final shutdown of the PLATO system, in 2015, and reminiscence on the topic of what the project actually achieved.
The Acknowledgements and the Interview and Oral History Sources are also worth reading, as are the references (and the more detailed Source Notes). They point to a masterful body of research, which gives evidence that the historical material here is credible and accurate.
Last:
I can't wait to see a YouTube talk of Brian Dear, hopefully at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, or ar the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. Or even at a SIGCIS conference, if they recover.
(Disclaimer: I am both a Ph.D. and a full Professor in the technical field of distributed (multimedia) systems, to which the PLATO system belongs. I have been waiting for this book for years. I'm glad I read it. I'm glad it was written.)
All, in short:
The content covers the longest-lived success you've probably never heard about, the PLATO education system, which during its peak lasting over a decade established the principles of streaming multimedia, online education, online gaming, social networking, and a bunch of technologies we're still trying to improve. Mostly between the 1950s and the 1980s, with a peak in the middle and a rapid descent afterwards. Then partially forgotten and rediscovered. In the end, PLATO had real, passionate users, some still online after over four decades.
Like Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe, this reads like a thorough, honest journalistic effort, with smarts. Like Robert A. Caro's now-tetralogy, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, it is also a long-term research project by an extremely curious and knowledgeable investigator.
Now, the remainder of my review, likely more detailed than I intended, but not detailed and polished enough to get all the stuff right:
Structural and stylistic overview:
The Friendly Orange Glow is structured in three parts encompassing twenty-seven chapters. It's about 600 pages of core content, excluding references, but it's one of those books where length does not matter or it's even a plus. The quality of the writing is very high, which to me comes as a surprise. For me, books themed on computer history tend to either be too sensationalist or personality-cult-driven-, or very dry. This one has excellent balance.
Content overview:
In Part I, The Automated Teacher, Brian Dear follows the evolution of ths system in its roughly first 10 years, from the basic vision of Alpert et al. in the 1950s, through Bitzer's first diagram and first flimsy TV-based incarnation in (Sep) 1960, to the CDC 1604 supercomputer(s) powering the backend of PLATO II for up to 32 terminals in 1962-63, to PLATO III's 20 real users (time-sharing) and the CATO lecture compiler in 1967-69, to PLATO IV and its plasma display (the orange glow) and up to 4,096 connections (by the new, CDC CYBER supercomputer) and music interface and what-not.
In Part II, The Fun They Had, the shift to software around the early to mid-1970s leads to real applications that people beyond compsci and general education would enjoy, and practically to the premises of online digital presence and long-range large-scale communication (tens to hundreds to thousands of miles, between thousands of people, although not all online at concurrently) - this is pompous for chat, instant messaging (character by character woth low latency, something we don't have even now), forums, collective notes, fancy emojis and animated text (editable, so well beyond what ASCII-art brought to the scene), online voting, political activism and surveys, online newspapers, blogs, etc. etc. etc. And there were online games! Online strategy and role-playing and first-person-shooter and flight sim and Elite and... all MMOs... and as addictive as we know them to be today. Nothing was as polished as you see it now, but this was say 1975 so almost 45 years ago!
There's also a very nice parallel to Tom Wolfe's Ziggurat - where competitors try to climb, at the detriment of others - and a deep analysis of the social network forming around PLATO, by someone who's actually been there long-term, and then spent another 25 years interviewing the people who were there. Combined with material extracted from the original notes written by these and others in the 1970s and 1980s, it's the right stuff with only a little positive bias - after all, the author likes PLATO and its people.
In Part III, Getting to Scale, there's the question of (business) scale, and PLATO will end up a product and a pawn in the hands of fumbling CDC leadership. We learn about the many deployments of PLATO, about a grand vision to scale it to a million terminals (CDC), about another to make it a general multimedia and communication platform (Bitzer and his lab CERL), and finally about how these visions bumped into the reality walls of technology and politics and money. In the last chapter in this part, Leaving the Nest, we hear about the (major) contributions to the industry at-large of the former project and tech leads from PLATO, now deploying their talents elsewhere; there's so much!
The Epilogue depicts the final shutdown of the PLATO system, in 2015, and reminiscence on the topic of what the project actually achieved.
The Acknowledgements and the Interview and Oral History Sources are also worth reading, as are the references (and the more detailed Source Notes). They point to a masterful body of research, which gives evidence that the historical material here is credible and accurate.
Last:
I can't wait to see a YouTube talk of Brian Dear, hopefully at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, or ar the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. Or even at a SIGCIS conference, if they recover.
March 20, 2023
Started this thick volume on April 1, and had to check twice to make sure I wasn't being fooled. This is the story of computing both ahead of it's time and mostly ignored by the mainstream. The information is interesting, if too complete, and the history scattered at times.
The first 200 pages are an excellent history of the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) terminal and the principal figures. Just the right amount of technical detail balances with history and even philosophy (of education). The next few hundred pages rambles some, covering a lot of territory. Topics such as games and network communities are discussed with relevance to PLATO. Firm editing and a few less anecdotes may have helped here.
The final section of the book covers the inevitable downfall of the company and the terminal, for a variety of reasons. The investments in Russia and Iran were unpredictably poorly timed, the overpricing of new hardware could have been avoided, but in reality the juggernaut of personal computers would have been impossible to avoid. The author clearly has some strong feelings about this topic. The book then concludes with some short bios of famous names connected to PLATO and an extensive bibliography and index.
I liked it and learned a lot. It is comparable to Stephen Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Walter Isaacson's The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
The first 200 pages are an excellent history of the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) terminal and the principal figures. Just the right amount of technical detail balances with history and even philosophy (of education). The next few hundred pages rambles some, covering a lot of territory. Topics such as games and network communities are discussed with relevance to PLATO. Firm editing and a few less anecdotes may have helped here.
The final section of the book covers the inevitable downfall of the company and the terminal, for a variety of reasons. The investments in Russia and Iran were unpredictably poorly timed, the overpricing of new hardware could have been avoided, but in reality the juggernaut of personal computers would have been impossible to avoid. The author clearly has some strong feelings about this topic. The book then concludes with some short bios of famous names connected to PLATO and an extensive bibliography and index.
I liked it and learned a lot. It is comparable to Stephen Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Walter Isaacson's The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
August 6, 2021
Some incredible stories that would otherwise have gone untold if not for this impressive work. It was often difficult to get through sections that were saccharine and nostalgic. I suspect this nostalgia led to details in here that rang insignificant or redundant to me.
December 16, 2021
Torn. 5 for telling the story 3 for lengthy digressions. You might argue that those stories of distinct people are the book, though.
November 21, 2017
“The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear documents the “Dawn of Cyberculture” with deep, readable details of the personalities, the politics, the culture, and stories of the development of the PLATO system. It reminds me of the quality writing of Tracy Kidder in “The Soul of the Machine” (1981). “The Friendly Orange Glow” strongly deserves the five stars Amazon allows. (Though six would be more accurate.)
What is PLATO, you ask? The stuffy description would be that it was started in 1960 as a computer-based education system, a way to improve the learning (training?) of the United States to help keep ahead of the Soviet Union. It starts in the 1950s, touching on the impetus and mindset caused by the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The Cold War.
But, the PLATO system evolved to become much more than that. PLATO IV expanded the horizons of being an on-campus system in the 1960s to a far-reaching networked system in the early 1970s. In 1973 and 1974 alone, interactive chat, screen sharing, person notes (email), notesfiles (topic discussion groups), multi-player networked games, animated text graphics (animated emojis), graphic logon pages (Goodle search page), and more all provided a social dimension much broader than just being used for training.
“The Friendly Orange Glow” (TFOG) details the culture in which this environment thrived; the culture led by Don Bitzer and supported by the creative team at the University of Illinois. This development approach helped support the development of these many capabilities.
It also highlights stories, as Brian Dear suggests, three books worth of stories, with heart and emotion, the highs and pitfalls of online culture. How careers were made; how careers were lost by the addictive nature that PLATO affected some, many flunking from college or getting divorced because of the interactive networked games or discussion groups.
In late 1975, an interactive story, Guanogap, was released in installments. It was written as if you were watching over the shoulder of the narrator while he interacts with various characters, reads notes and pnotes (email). You see it happen. It is a snapshot of the culture, of the life on the PLATO system in 1975. I looked forward to every installment. I have yet to see an implementation of an interactive story anywhere on the Internet.
Wait, you say, weren’t interactive network games first started on the Internet in the 1990s? (Or, if you knew of the Xwindows systems of the 1980s, weren’t they developed there?)
Wasn’t networked computer-based training (CBT) first done using MOOCs in the 2000s? No. The first time-sharing use of a computer was developed for PLATO in the early 1960s.
John Brunner published my favorite read, “The Shockwave Rider” in 1975. I re-read it every few years and remain astounded at how forward looking it was, describing a twenty-first century world dominated by computer networks, hackers, cyber crime, and more. I don’t know whether Brunner ever saw or knew about the PLATO system, but the book also describes aspects of what PLATO was at the time in the early 1970s and what it could have become. The Internet has become that network. It first existed on the PLATO network.
You can still SEE and TOUCH the PLATO system live on the Internet. Find it at cyber1.org. You can still use Notes, talkomatic, term-talk, and play the multitude of interactive games. Every Sunday evening, there is a pickup game in Empire. You might even see me there, though I tend to get killed a lot.
Guanogap is also there for you to read and experience.
What is PLATO, you ask? The stuffy description would be that it was started in 1960 as a computer-based education system, a way to improve the learning (training?) of the United States to help keep ahead of the Soviet Union. It starts in the 1950s, touching on the impetus and mindset caused by the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The Cold War.
But, the PLATO system evolved to become much more than that. PLATO IV expanded the horizons of being an on-campus system in the 1960s to a far-reaching networked system in the early 1970s. In 1973 and 1974 alone, interactive chat, screen sharing, person notes (email), notesfiles (topic discussion groups), multi-player networked games, animated text graphics (animated emojis), graphic logon pages (Goodle search page), and more all provided a social dimension much broader than just being used for training.
“The Friendly Orange Glow” (TFOG) details the culture in which this environment thrived; the culture led by Don Bitzer and supported by the creative team at the University of Illinois. This development approach helped support the development of these many capabilities.
It also highlights stories, as Brian Dear suggests, three books worth of stories, with heart and emotion, the highs and pitfalls of online culture. How careers were made; how careers were lost by the addictive nature that PLATO affected some, many flunking from college or getting divorced because of the interactive networked games or discussion groups.
In late 1975, an interactive story, Guanogap, was released in installments. It was written as if you were watching over the shoulder of the narrator while he interacts with various characters, reads notes and pnotes (email). You see it happen. It is a snapshot of the culture, of the life on the PLATO system in 1975. I looked forward to every installment. I have yet to see an implementation of an interactive story anywhere on the Internet.
Wait, you say, weren’t interactive network games first started on the Internet in the 1990s? (Or, if you knew of the Xwindows systems of the 1980s, weren’t they developed there?)
Wasn’t networked computer-based training (CBT) first done using MOOCs in the 2000s? No. The first time-sharing use of a computer was developed for PLATO in the early 1960s.
John Brunner published my favorite read, “The Shockwave Rider” in 1975. I re-read it every few years and remain astounded at how forward looking it was, describing a twenty-first century world dominated by computer networks, hackers, cyber crime, and more. I don’t know whether Brunner ever saw or knew about the PLATO system, but the book also describes aspects of what PLATO was at the time in the early 1970s and what it could have become. The Internet has become that network. It first existed on the PLATO network.
You can still SEE and TOUCH the PLATO system live on the Internet. Find it at cyber1.org. You can still use Notes, talkomatic, term-talk, and play the multitude of interactive games. Every Sunday evening, there is a pickup game in Empire. You might even see me there, though I tend to get killed a lot.
Guanogap is also there for you to read and experience.
January 7, 2018
The Friendly Orange Glow : The Untold Story of the PLATO system and the dawn of cyberculture (2017) by Brian Dear is a fascinating but wildly too long account of the PLATO interactive, networked computer system developed at the University of Illinois.
PLATO was clearly an incredibly advanced system that had high speed interactive graphics and networking. It was started as a system that was intended to greatly enhance teaching by providing individually paced lessons for students. PLATO got many people to use the system in highly surprising that included early networked games, bulletin boards and networked chat. PLATO also had a plasma screen and critical research on plasma and flat panel displays was done for it.
The system was commercialised by CDC but largely failed to gain traction. PLATO also almost became the basis for the system at Xerox PARC. The system is also interesting because it was an important, revolutionary system that wasn't developed in the US Northeast or on the Pacific.
Dear himself first used the system in 1979 and went on to have a great career founding several companies and working at a number of significant technology firms.
It's an incredible bit of largely unknown history. The book could have been fantastic but due to the author's desire to get too much in and the lack of an editor who didn't weed the book down it's a real slog. It is a great resource for historians though.
There is an excellent interview with the author on the also excellent 'Internet History Podcast'. If you're at all interested in the topic that would be a great place to start. This is also where I found the book.
PLATO was started in the 1960s and initially used the ILLIAC as the mainframe behind before migrating onto more powerful machines. It was led by Daniel Alpert, a physicist who made the inspired decision of hiring Don Bitzer, another physicist to be the technical lead. Bitzer made the team very informal and allowed anyone who could show they could contribute to contribute remarkably including high school students as well.
By the 1970s the system could support thousands of users and the labs at the university were fairly open and games and other social things were created that were hugely successful. Remarkably Bitzer allowed this use and cleverly used it to stress test and improve the machine. It had much of what is now on the internet 25 years before it was widely used in other places and 10-15 years before Unix based systems caught up.
Dear has a huge section on all the contributors and game programmers that he could track down. He also includes biographies for many of them. It's quite amazing, but also pretty tiring.
The book is fascinating for people interested in the history of technology and it's surprising for anyone who is familiar with what is usually presented as the main history of technology from mainframes to Unix to PCs. The PLATO system has clearly been dramatically overlooked and this book does a lot to correct that. It is, however, also far too long. One way to deal with it is to really speed read through any sections that the reader doesn't find interesting. But if a third to a half of the book had been cut it would have been much better. Still, Dear deserves enormous credit for compiling and writing the book.
PLATO was clearly an incredibly advanced system that had high speed interactive graphics and networking. It was started as a system that was intended to greatly enhance teaching by providing individually paced lessons for students. PLATO got many people to use the system in highly surprising that included early networked games, bulletin boards and networked chat. PLATO also had a plasma screen and critical research on plasma and flat panel displays was done for it.
The system was commercialised by CDC but largely failed to gain traction. PLATO also almost became the basis for the system at Xerox PARC. The system is also interesting because it was an important, revolutionary system that wasn't developed in the US Northeast or on the Pacific.
Dear himself first used the system in 1979 and went on to have a great career founding several companies and working at a number of significant technology firms.
It's an incredible bit of largely unknown history. The book could have been fantastic but due to the author's desire to get too much in and the lack of an editor who didn't weed the book down it's a real slog. It is a great resource for historians though.
There is an excellent interview with the author on the also excellent 'Internet History Podcast'. If you're at all interested in the topic that would be a great place to start. This is also where I found the book.
PLATO was started in the 1960s and initially used the ILLIAC as the mainframe behind before migrating onto more powerful machines. It was led by Daniel Alpert, a physicist who made the inspired decision of hiring Don Bitzer, another physicist to be the technical lead. Bitzer made the team very informal and allowed anyone who could show they could contribute to contribute remarkably including high school students as well.
By the 1970s the system could support thousands of users and the labs at the university were fairly open and games and other social things were created that were hugely successful. Remarkably Bitzer allowed this use and cleverly used it to stress test and improve the machine. It had much of what is now on the internet 25 years before it was widely used in other places and 10-15 years before Unix based systems caught up.
Dear has a huge section on all the contributors and game programmers that he could track down. He also includes biographies for many of them. It's quite amazing, but also pretty tiring.
The book is fascinating for people interested in the history of technology and it's surprising for anyone who is familiar with what is usually presented as the main history of technology from mainframes to Unix to PCs. The PLATO system has clearly been dramatically overlooked and this book does a lot to correct that. It is, however, also far too long. One way to deal with it is to really speed read through any sections that the reader doesn't find interesting. But if a third to a half of the book had been cut it would have been much better. Still, Dear deserves enormous credit for compiling and writing the book.
November 1, 2017
The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear. My father was a computer programmer and his first use of the computer systems was PLATO and NovaNET as part of his training to work with different platforms and be able to solve other people’s porblems. I was blessed to have one of the first in-home computer units as a young child because of his job (we were the envy of the neighborhood, no one had ever seen these monstrosities before!
I was really excited to read this book, because of our family history with computers and networking. Sadly, I was unable to finish the book., The only reason I was unable to finish this book was in the middle of the book there was too much weaving in and out of the timelines and many repeats of history, which made me want to throw the modern day representation of those huge computers of learning—my iPad at the wall. It was too much repeating for me and I lost patience.
Thanks for the opportunity to read the portion of the book I did read.
We all owe B.F. Skinner for the wonder we have In our lives for computer use while learning even in lieu of the education systems till not grasping the proper use of his vision.
My early love of gaming started young, I appreciate the opportunity to feel a connection to some of the history in the book. While as a college student, I used numerous Pearson programs. I appreciate Mr. Dear for taking upon himself the challenge of learning about PLATO and telling the PLATO story so we can all learn about an integral component in our lives and show us the past where computing has been in existence for much longer than most people ever knew.
I give this book a rating of 3/5 stars.
I was given this book by Penquin’s First to Read for my honest review. Thank, Penquin Random House!
* I finally finished the book. It was better than I originally rated it. I know give it a 4/5 stars.
I was really excited to read this book, because of our family history with computers and networking. Sadly, I was unable to finish the book., The only reason I was unable to finish this book was in the middle of the book there was too much weaving in and out of the timelines and many repeats of history, which made me want to throw the modern day representation of those huge computers of learning—my iPad at the wall. It was too much repeating for me and I lost patience.
Thanks for the opportunity to read the portion of the book I did read.
We all owe B.F. Skinner for the wonder we have In our lives for computer use while learning even in lieu of the education systems till not grasping the proper use of his vision.
My early love of gaming started young, I appreciate the opportunity to feel a connection to some of the history in the book. While as a college student, I used numerous Pearson programs. I appreciate Mr. Dear for taking upon himself the challenge of learning about PLATO and telling the PLATO story so we can all learn about an integral component in our lives and show us the past where computing has been in existence for much longer than most people ever knew.
I give this book a rating of 3/5 stars.
I was given this book by Penquin’s First to Read for my honest review. Thank, Penquin Random House!
* I finally finished the book. It was better than I originally rated it. I know give it a 4/5 stars.
October 15, 2017
"Every manager at any level had to go through a minimum of forty hours per year of PLATO lessons. In Silicon Valley, this practice is affectionately called "eating your own dog food" and was generally considered a good thing."
I received a copy of this ebook from firsttoread.com in exchange for an honest review.
This is a surprisingly dense book on the history of PLATO and personal computers. This book talks about the history of computer terminals, the rise of email, and how gaming addictions began decades ago. There is also a lot of background on the personal histories of the team involved with PLATO and anecdotes about how decisions were made. We see how PLATO was used for games, meeting people, and even as a way for suicidal individuals to reach out. There's also an interesting history of how PLATO gained ground internationally, which I would have liked to hear more about.
The book closes with some history about how PLATO lead into modern computers with companies like Mac. I think the change from the super expensive terminals to personal computers is the most interesting part and I would have liked to hear more about that. But overall I learned some new things from the book about how people were connecting via computers long before the internet.
I received a copy of this ebook from firsttoread.com in exchange for an honest review.
This is a surprisingly dense book on the history of PLATO and personal computers. This book talks about the history of computer terminals, the rise of email, and how gaming addictions began decades ago. There is also a lot of background on the personal histories of the team involved with PLATO and anecdotes about how decisions were made. We see how PLATO was used for games, meeting people, and even as a way for suicidal individuals to reach out. There's also an interesting history of how PLATO gained ground internationally, which I would have liked to hear more about.
The book closes with some history about how PLATO lead into modern computers with companies like Mac. I think the change from the super expensive terminals to personal computers is the most interesting part and I would have liked to hear more about that. But overall I learned some new things from the book about how people were connecting via computers long before the internet.
December 4, 2017
Brian Dear has more talent as a writer than I ever imagined. This is a fun read! Thorough, thoughtful, accurate, amazingly well researched, and an entertaining hoot for anyone who lived it! I was one of those annoying young rug rats running around CERL in the early 1970's, playing and writing games and learning about computers. PLATO took me from Illinois to Colorado, California, and Alaska as a programmer before the PC and Web revolutionized everything. If you use Facebook today, you should know about PLATO -- we had it all long before Zuckerwhatsisface learned to breathe! If you think computer games started with Pong, you'd better read this book. If you wonder what people did before email, read this book! And especially, if all you can type with is your thumbs, read this book!
January 26, 2018
Absolutely essential reading for anyone with an interest in online/computer culture. An (elsewhere) almost shockingly untold story, exhaustively researched for over 30 years.
The only thing stopping this from being a five-star rating is that this book is, honestly, much too long -- I sympathize with the desire to record as much information as possible, but even as someone with a voracious interest in the subject, it was a little exhausting to get through at times.
But I'm nitpicking, this book is absolutely worth picking up; even if you give up before the end, you'll learn so much about what it was like to be there on the ground floor when people realised they could start building a virtual community together.
The only thing stopping this from being a five-star rating is that this book is, honestly, much too long -- I sympathize with the desire to record as much information as possible, but even as someone with a voracious interest in the subject, it was a little exhausting to get through at times.
But I'm nitpicking, this book is absolutely worth picking up; even if you give up before the end, you'll learn so much about what it was like to be there on the ground floor when people realised they could start building a virtual community together.
December 31, 2017
I had a PLATO terminal in my house in the early 80’s, got hooked on the lessons and multiplayer games, and didn’t see anything like it again until at least the mid 99’s, particularly the games.
I absolutely loved reading the history of the system and the culture of PLATO. Now, when I tell people I experienced instant chat, multiplayer games, MUDs, and BBS-like systems in the early 80’s, and they look at me like I have horns growing out of my head, I can point them to this book. And to cyber1 on the web, an emulator of the real deal.
Must read for anyone who wants to see how the future was both predicted and lost for a decade.
I absolutely loved reading the history of the system and the culture of PLATO. Now, when I tell people I experienced instant chat, multiplayer games, MUDs, and BBS-like systems in the early 80’s, and they look at me like I have horns growing out of my head, I can point them to this book. And to cyber1 on the web, an emulator of the real deal.
Must read for anyone who wants to see how the future was both predicted and lost for a decade.
December 10, 2017
The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear is an endeavor to preserve a history that is at risk of being lost. The research put into compiling the history of the PLATO computer system is clear in the length and depth of the details and the extensive list of sources and notes. The personal interest and viewpoint of the author is clear from beginning to end. The book is lengthy and dense but nevertheless a fascinating story of a time, a place, and a community.
Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017...
Reviewed for Penguin First to Read
Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017...
Reviewed for Penguin First to Read
April 13, 2021
What if everything you know about the World Wide Web in the 90s and 2000s already happened, in the 70s, on a weird mainframe computer at the University of Illinois with terminals connected by phone lines all over the US and the world? The “subversive innovation” of Don Bitzer and his “kids” led to discoveries about online communities and gaming and education and cyberculture that wouldn’t be re-discovered for decades. Did PLATO achieve its educational goals - maybe not exactly, but the world is different for it, even if no one knows it.
January 25, 2018
Extraordinary. Actually got goosebumps upon reading the final paragraphs. Congratulations to Brian Dear. What an accomplishment. Proper review to follow in a day or two.
June 7, 2025
Brian Dear's The Friendly Orange Glow is a wonderful addition to the annals of computing history. Relatively few people know about the PLATO computer system that Dear describes: it was ahead of its time, developed during the 1960s and 1970s by computer learning researchers at the University of Illinois' Computer Education Research Laboratory (CERL) using primitive-by-today's-standards Control Data Corporation (CDC) mainframes. The fact that PLATO represents a missing piece of computing history is an error that Dear sought to correct. PLATO's invention of touch-screen plasma displays, complex graphics, and interactive, high-level programming languages (without the need for intermediate formats like punch cards!) predated similar innovations by decades and exposes the lie that computers didn't become user-friendly until the Macintosh came along. It's possible that computing history might have turned out differently and maybe more in PLATO's favor had CERL's director taken the job, when offered, to be the founding director of Xerox PARC; the job instead went to George Pake, and the rest is history (including the "mother of all demos" that Steve Jobs saw in the late 1970's on the Xerox Alto, thus inspiring the Macintosh, etc.)
PLATO was also ultimately doomed by CDC's inability to commercialize the technology and also by their failure to recognize the coming end of the mainframe era, a development that ultimately destroyed CDC itself. Despite CDC's dropping of the ball, niche use cases for PLATO persisted well into the 2000's; the FAA's system for training air traffic controllers limped along on a by-then-ancient CDC CYBER 70 for years. PLATO was perhaps more successful at spinning out talent and other ventures that were more polished & professionalized versions of tools that existed on it: the PC games Castle Wolfenstein, Freecell, Microsoft Flight Simulator and many others were based on primitive versions that existed on PLATO; the wildly-successful collaboration software Lotus Notes was inspired by the "notesfiles" functionality; and chat tools like TERM-talk made their way into Digital Equipment Corporation's VMS by way of the same programmers who had worked on it at UI.
I have to give Dear appropriate recognition for his persistence in pursuing this book project for over thirty years; he'd written early drafts as early as 1985-1987 but the finished material didn't see the light of day until 2017. Fortunately, his editor was still at Random House! The Friendly Orange Glow does struggle a bit at the start to gain escape velocity, as Dear gets a little trapped in describing all of the personalities involved not only in advanced systems development at CERL but also key figures in pedagogical philosophy like B.F. Skinner. The real fun in the book doesn't start until Part 2 when Dear finally gets into the descriptions of what it was like to interact with PLATO and the many hours/days/weeks/years that students, addicted to the "friendly orange glow", spent engaged with PLATO terminals. Hence 4 out of 5 stars; many readers, I suspect, may pick up this book and never slog through Part 1. They should persevere because the reward is ultimately worth it.
PLATO was also ultimately doomed by CDC's inability to commercialize the technology and also by their failure to recognize the coming end of the mainframe era, a development that ultimately destroyed CDC itself. Despite CDC's dropping of the ball, niche use cases for PLATO persisted well into the 2000's; the FAA's system for training air traffic controllers limped along on a by-then-ancient CDC CYBER 70 for years. PLATO was perhaps more successful at spinning out talent and other ventures that were more polished & professionalized versions of tools that existed on it: the PC games Castle Wolfenstein, Freecell, Microsoft Flight Simulator and many others were based on primitive versions that existed on PLATO; the wildly-successful collaboration software Lotus Notes was inspired by the "notesfiles" functionality; and chat tools like TERM-talk made their way into Digital Equipment Corporation's VMS by way of the same programmers who had worked on it at UI.
I have to give Dear appropriate recognition for his persistence in pursuing this book project for over thirty years; he'd written early drafts as early as 1985-1987 but the finished material didn't see the light of day until 2017. Fortunately, his editor was still at Random House! The Friendly Orange Glow does struggle a bit at the start to gain escape velocity, as Dear gets a little trapped in describing all of the personalities involved not only in advanced systems development at CERL but also key figures in pedagogical philosophy like B.F. Skinner. The real fun in the book doesn't start until Part 2 when Dear finally gets into the descriptions of what it was like to interact with PLATO and the many hours/days/weeks/years that students, addicted to the "friendly orange glow", spent engaged with PLATO terminals. Hence 4 out of 5 stars; many readers, I suspect, may pick up this book and never slog through Part 1. They should persevere because the reward is ultimately worth it.
July 19, 2022
Choose your answer, and press NEXT to continue.
When I was young the person I idolized was Spock. Spock was logical. Spock didn't allow minor insults from the ship's doctor to phase him. I earnestly wanted some of Spock's coolness to cope with insults from older siblings. So when my dad asked me in 1977 what I wanted for my birthday, I replied "A computer! Spock has a computer. I want a computer!"
My dad (a colonel in the Air Force) recently shifted from flying jets to managing technology projects. He explained carefully that computers were large, expensive devices costing millions of dollars which would fill our garage. But... he knew some people up in Illinois I could talk to. We could go visit a computer center.
A few months later we were moving my grandmother out of her house in Rantoul, IL. After spending the day moving boxes we drove down to the UIUC campus to visit people my dad had met through various Department of Defense connections. We got the grand tour of the computer center complete with some hands-on time. After a few short lessons, I was using Esperanto to tell a virtual dog to move around the screen.
I didn't know it at the time but I was visiting the future. Email, online forums, online messaging, chat rooms... they appeared first on PLATO, an educational computer network created in the 60s (or 70s, depending on whom you ask) at the Computer Education Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Originally intended as a research platform to test various learning theories and prototype computer-aided instruction technologies, PLATO quickly became something much more. It became the center of one of the first large online communities. At a time when the ARPANet was an online sideshow, PLATO hosted thousands (if not tens of thousands) of users.
Fast forward to the mid-80s and I'm at Florida State University for the summer; finally I have the opportunity to spend serious time online, on PLATO. I only got a summer's worth, but it left a mark.
I can't remember when I bumped into Brian Dear. Probably a friend of a friend of some of the 70s era PLATO hackers. But sometime in the 2000's I remember him saying he was interviewing people about their PLATO experiences. I don't think mine was especially notable; like many other people who encountered it, I was drawn in by the plasma screen, what Brian calls "The Friendly Orange Glow."
This book is the (nearly complete) story of the birth, life and death of the computer network that amazed me as a child. It's a bit long, but so is the story. Dear goes into details about the environment at UIUC in the early 60s when the project kicked off. Then talks about multiple iterations of hardware: it's capabilities and drawbacks. Finally talks about the people, communities and poitics of the network it spawned.
DARPA created the Internet, but every bit of software you use on the internet was probably prototyped first on a largely forgotten mainframe in the middle of an Illinois cornfield. If you're interested in the history of computers, networks or online computer systems, you have to read this book.
When I was young the person I idolized was Spock. Spock was logical. Spock didn't allow minor insults from the ship's doctor to phase him. I earnestly wanted some of Spock's coolness to cope with insults from older siblings. So when my dad asked me in 1977 what I wanted for my birthday, I replied "A computer! Spock has a computer. I want a computer!"
My dad (a colonel in the Air Force) recently shifted from flying jets to managing technology projects. He explained carefully that computers were large, expensive devices costing millions of dollars which would fill our garage. But... he knew some people up in Illinois I could talk to. We could go visit a computer center.
A few months later we were moving my grandmother out of her house in Rantoul, IL. After spending the day moving boxes we drove down to the UIUC campus to visit people my dad had met through various Department of Defense connections. We got the grand tour of the computer center complete with some hands-on time. After a few short lessons, I was using Esperanto to tell a virtual dog to move around the screen.
I didn't know it at the time but I was visiting the future. Email, online forums, online messaging, chat rooms... they appeared first on PLATO, an educational computer network created in the 60s (or 70s, depending on whom you ask) at the Computer Education Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Originally intended as a research platform to test various learning theories and prototype computer-aided instruction technologies, PLATO quickly became something much more. It became the center of one of the first large online communities. At a time when the ARPANet was an online sideshow, PLATO hosted thousands (if not tens of thousands) of users.
Fast forward to the mid-80s and I'm at Florida State University for the summer; finally I have the opportunity to spend serious time online, on PLATO. I only got a summer's worth, but it left a mark.
I can't remember when I bumped into Brian Dear. Probably a friend of a friend of some of the 70s era PLATO hackers. But sometime in the 2000's I remember him saying he was interviewing people about their PLATO experiences. I don't think mine was especially notable; like many other people who encountered it, I was drawn in by the plasma screen, what Brian calls "The Friendly Orange Glow."
This book is the (nearly complete) story of the birth, life and death of the computer network that amazed me as a child. It's a bit long, but so is the story. Dear goes into details about the environment at UIUC in the early 60s when the project kicked off. Then talks about multiple iterations of hardware: it's capabilities and drawbacks. Finally talks about the people, communities and poitics of the network it spawned.
DARPA created the Internet, but every bit of software you use on the internet was probably prototyped first on a largely forgotten mainframe in the middle of an Illinois cornfield. If you're interested in the history of computers, networks or online computer systems, you have to read this book.
October 20, 2017
I received an early copy of this book from Penguin's First to Read program.
As a someone with a saltwater view (I didn't realize there were freshwater views, I figured it was an unpeopled land of quiet groves of trees and fields of corn and little else), I was pleased to read about something I knew very little about. This was a fascinating history of an impressive feat in the early days of modern computing. Dear does a great job setting the scene and revealing some of the personalities involved in the development of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. It's fascinating to see so many parallels between the efforts to create a teaching machine and some of the stuff going on in education with computers today. It just goes to show how far we've come (the availability of cheap internet access and access to computing power) and how we still make the same mistakes (the author muses, "[s]chools continue to spend billions on computers, software, and network, but the question remains who is benefiting more, students or vendors.").
In the early part of the book and development of PLATO it hit me how many of the things we did in the 80s and early 90s, interactive fiction through MUDs and tools like Eastgate's StorySpace, while they felt like brand new inventions then, had been around for ages at that stage, pioneering all sorts of new interactions we take for granted now.
Dear tells the story really well, though I felt the slightest touch of seasickness in the middle of the book as we seemed to wash back and forth over some of the same time periods as he had to backtrack to walk through the timeline of another thread in the story of PLATO. But the evolution of PLATO from a government-funded, academic-hosted project to adapt to various computing trends and eventually fizzle out with the closure of NovaNET (owned by Pearson, taking the story of computers in education from near the start with B.F. Skinner to a modern day education company) kept the story interesting all along.
If you're interested in the history of computing, computers in education, and the beginnings of networked culture this is an excellent story.
As a someone with a saltwater view (I didn't realize there were freshwater views, I figured it was an unpeopled land of quiet groves of trees and fields of corn and little else), I was pleased to read about something I knew very little about. This was a fascinating history of an impressive feat in the early days of modern computing. Dear does a great job setting the scene and revealing some of the personalities involved in the development of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. It's fascinating to see so many parallels between the efforts to create a teaching machine and some of the stuff going on in education with computers today. It just goes to show how far we've come (the availability of cheap internet access and access to computing power) and how we still make the same mistakes (the author muses, "[s]chools continue to spend billions on computers, software, and network, but the question remains who is benefiting more, students or vendors.").
In the early part of the book and development of PLATO it hit me how many of the things we did in the 80s and early 90s, interactive fiction through MUDs and tools like Eastgate's StorySpace, while they felt like brand new inventions then, had been around for ages at that stage, pioneering all sorts of new interactions we take for granted now.
Dear tells the story really well, though I felt the slightest touch of seasickness in the middle of the book as we seemed to wash back and forth over some of the same time periods as he had to backtrack to walk through the timeline of another thread in the story of PLATO. But the evolution of PLATO from a government-funded, academic-hosted project to adapt to various computing trends and eventually fizzle out with the closure of NovaNET (owned by Pearson, taking the story of computers in education from near the start with B.F. Skinner to a modern day education company) kept the story interesting all along.
If you're interested in the history of computing, computers in education, and the beginnings of networked culture this is an excellent story.
October 28, 2019
Fascinating story of PLATO system. Somewhat overdetailed, but in a nutshell it all makes sense to build the whole picture of system evolution and decline.
Monumental list of people interviewed http://www.friendlyorangeglow.com/peo...
PLATO games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQ...
Tutor language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUTOR_(...
Monumental list of people interviewed http://www.friendlyorangeglow.com/peo...
PLATO games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQ...
Tutor language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUTOR_(...
February 1, 2019
A well narrated book about the history of the PLATO system and how it influenced an online community revolution.
April 18, 2022
A wonderful look at a mostly forgotten pioneering computer system. There's a lot of fascinating computer history here but the most fabulous thing is what an anachronism PLATO was. Imagine it's 1977 and you're on campus and you can play Star Trek, Tank Battles, or Dungeons & Dragons on a computer. The over-the-shelf retail game TELENGARD was a straight up port (rip-off?) of the PLATO game "dnd" and I didn't get to see it until the mid-1980s. I can't stop trying to imagine what it must have been like to have pizza, coke, and hours of weekend time at the computer lab fighting monsters when outside that lab the closest people would have come to this was PONG?? Amazing. Plus it's got a cameo by Leonard Nimoy!
If I have a complaint for the average reader it's that the book is very thorough and this is a book largely about technology history so some of these chapters might be a bit too dry and esoteric for folks not into the vintage computing scene. But for me, I loved it.
If I have a complaint for the average reader it's that the book is very thorough and this is a book largely about technology history so some of these chapters might be a bit too dry and esoteric for folks not into the vintage computing scene. But for me, I loved it.
July 13, 2023
For context, I grew up in the Chicago suburbs during the 1980s and 90s. I experienced, second-hand, the technical and economic impact of intuitions such as Fermi and Argonne National laboratories, U.S. Robotics, Tellabs, Motorola, the Universities of Chicago, Northwestern (and to a lesser extent) Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Purdue. Since that time, I’ve made my way to the modern mecca of technology, where I work in the industry, first as a programmer and now as a manager.
Meanwhile, over those same years, there have been several attempts to brand the technical innovations that come from the Midwest. Names such as Silicon Prairie and Digital Third Coast have been thrown around as suggested monikers to be included with the likes of Research Triangle Park (aka RTP – Raleigh-Durham), Silicon Alley (New York City) and of course, Silicon Valley (San Francisco Bay Area).
My point is to emphasize the very first theme in Dear’s book, a point raised so early, in the Preface, that some readers may have simply skipped over it. In the mythology of computers there is one story, the story of innovation on the coasts. Be it at celebrated innovation centers on the east – Bell Labs, IBM, MIT Model Railroad Club. Or on the west, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox PARC, Homebrew Computing Club.
In doing so, we have done ourselves a disservice.
Divided into three main sections, The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear, tells the story of the PLATO System - it’s origin and influence - that came to life at the University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign’s Computer-based Education Research Lab (CERL). The first section is dedicated to the founding of CERL and the political, economic, philosophical and psychological underpinnings that led a team of engineers and professors to first envision a computer-assisted instruction platform in the 1950s.
The chapters in the second section explore some on the unexpected side effects of the new platform, the “cyberculture” that took root, both physically and virtually. With hindsight, it is obvious that a computing system build on fundamental ideas of self-pacing and immediate feedback would also be perfect for other activities, gaming and collaboration.
In the same decade Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, the medium is the message, a new medium had been built. The stated goal was education, but instead the medium itself took hold and one of the first true online communities in the world came to life.
The final third dives into the details of the public-private partnership between CERL and the Control Data Corporation (CDC). Starting with the second-generation system the backbone of PLATO was built on computing hardware designed and built by CDC. CDC, based in Minnesota, in the 1960s was one of the nine major computer companies. As the PLATO program grew at CERL, so did the involvement of CDC.
Yet, by the mid-1970s, the market was shifting away from mainframes. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) had already made headway in the market with its minicomputers and the Altair 8800, a homebuilt microcomputer, was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics.
Meanwhile, over those same years, there have been several attempts to brand the technical innovations that come from the Midwest. Names such as Silicon Prairie and Digital Third Coast have been thrown around as suggested monikers to be included with the likes of Research Triangle Park (aka RTP – Raleigh-Durham), Silicon Alley (New York City) and of course, Silicon Valley (San Francisco Bay Area).
My point is to emphasize the very first theme in Dear’s book, a point raised so early, in the Preface, that some readers may have simply skipped over it. In the mythology of computers there is one story, the story of innovation on the coasts. Be it at celebrated innovation centers on the east – Bell Labs, IBM, MIT Model Railroad Club. Or on the west, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox PARC, Homebrew Computing Club.
In doing so, we have done ourselves a disservice.
Divided into three main sections, The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear, tells the story of the PLATO System - it’s origin and influence - that came to life at the University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign’s Computer-based Education Research Lab (CERL). The first section is dedicated to the founding of CERL and the political, economic, philosophical and psychological underpinnings that led a team of engineers and professors to first envision a computer-assisted instruction platform in the 1950s.
The growing body of late-1950s academic research and commercial projects inspired by the behaviorist work of Pressey, Skinner and Crowder had raised awareness of the advantages of teaching machines and programmed instruction, among those being Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback. Self-Pacing was a given, just as it had been with the earlier pre-computer boxes. The PLATO team took particular interest in the Immediate Feedback concept, imbuing the system with a need for responsiveness right down deep into the core of the hardware. (pg. 64)
The chapters in the second section explore some on the unexpected side effects of the new platform, the “cyberculture” that took root, both physically and virtually. With hindsight, it is obvious that a computing system build on fundamental ideas of self-pacing and immediate feedback would also be perfect for other activities, gaming and collaboration.
Instead of PLATO being the ultimate online teacher at the ultimate online Academy, rivaling that of the Greek figure for whom the system was named, a digital place to come and learn about everything from anthropology to zoology, PLATO had become, for so many young people, a place to come and learn about PLATO. A place to learn about each other. The system itself was the thing. (pg. 309)
In the same decade Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, the medium is the message, a new medium had been built. The stated goal was education, but instead the medium itself took hold and one of the first true online communities in the world came to life.
The final third dives into the details of the public-private partnership between CERL and the Control Data Corporation (CDC). Starting with the second-generation system the backbone of PLATO was built on computing hardware designed and built by CDC. CDC, based in Minnesota, in the 1960s was one of the nine major computer companies. As the PLATO program grew at CERL, so did the involvement of CDC.
CDC had by then [1975] recruited executives to drive the PLATO initiative, who in turn built teams, labs, offices and even had secured a PLATO system of their own quietly running in a Minneapolis suburb. (pg. 405)
Yet, by the mid-1970s, the market was shifting away from mainframes. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) had already made headway in the market with its minicomputers and the Altair 8800, a homebuilt microcomputer, was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics.
[Chuck] Miller says, “The thing that hurt PLATO the most was the way it was rammed down everybody’s throat as ‘Thou shalt take PLATO and make It prosperous,’ as opposed to ‘Here’s an opportunity, we have to change the way we do business.’ CDC just never got over ‘I want to sell a mainframe for $10 million.’ They never got over that. Their motto was If it plugs in the wall, it’s way too small. Got to be a mainframe, and going to a service was just beyond their comprehension.
So, is the reason why we don’t think of the Midwest as a hub of technological innovation the fault of the leaders at CERL and CDC, leaders who failed to embrace microcomputing over mainframes? Partly, but I think the simpler answer can be found in the final chapter, Leaving the Nest. Here Dear profiles the follow-on success some of the students, programmers and administrators of PLATO found later in life. People such as Ray Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell who would use the elements of collaboration on a connected system to form the core of Lotus Notes. Brand Fortner and Bruce Artwick who created the first flight simulator programs and whose work would go on to live in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator game. Additionally, while Brian Dear doesn’t include himself in this chapter, after encountering the PLATO System in 1979, went on to have a successfully career as a tech writer and businessperson.
The common denominator is that this “new wave” scatter across different parts of the country.
Contrast that to the “Traitorous eight”, William Shockley’s dissatisfied employees at Shockley Semiconductor who left to pave their own path. Instead of scattering across the country they stuck together to form Fairchild Semi just down the road from Shockley in Mountain View. Many of those who left would do it again, with Intel, AMD and several other businesses within the same 10-20 mile radius. In doing so, they helped transform a valley of carrots, almonds, prunes, apricots and cherries into a valley of silicon.
Brian Dear’s book is an impressively research and documented tale about what was and could have been. I would easily consider this work to be among the Top 5 must read books on how our digital world came to be, including some of the pitfalls we face today, on a much larger scale.
July 24, 2018
If you grew up in Champaign-Urbana Illinois in the 1970s and 80s, or attended the University of Illinois during that period, chances are you were familiar with PLATO. If you didn't, you probably never heard of it. As far back as 4th grade, I can remember my daily PLATO half-hour "shift." The classroom had four PLATO terminals. Each PLATO session contained interactive lessons in all the basic areas, followed by games that were fun but also instructive. Fast forward to my sophomore year at the U of I, and there's PLATO again - this time with supplemental lessons for my computer science class.
I'd long forgotten about PLATO, so this book definitely had some sentimental value to me. I even knew one of the names the author mentioned: Bob Yeager. He and his family lived on our block and they had a PLATO terminal in their basement. It was a big deal. However, I had no idea there was such a big PLATO culture, addicted to the games but also using the equivalent of email and blogs - long before they were mainstream.
The book is long, however, and gets a bit technical in places. I got to where I was skimming through some parts. PLATO is long-gone now, but nonetheless for anyone who remembers PLATO this book is a trip down memory lane.
I'd long forgotten about PLATO, so this book definitely had some sentimental value to me. I even knew one of the names the author mentioned: Bob Yeager. He and his family lived on our block and they had a PLATO terminal in their basement. It was a big deal. However, I had no idea there was such a big PLATO culture, addicted to the games but also using the equivalent of email and blogs - long before they were mainstream.
The book is long, however, and gets a bit technical in places. I got to where I was skimming through some parts. PLATO is long-gone now, but nonetheless for anyone who remembers PLATO this book is a trip down memory lane.
February 16, 2018
It's a great dive into an obscure but significant piece of computing history. Before reading I had little knowledge of the PLATO System, but this served as a fantastic history of the project, the community, and the innovations that helped pave the way for many of the technological advancements that we've seen in the last 40 years. The author's writing style very much reminds me of Walter Issacson's work. Specifically The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
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