A Book Recommendation for Bill Gates: The Story of PLATO 59
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: This holiday season, many Slashdot readers are likely to find gifts under the tree because of Bill Gates' book picks. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it seems that turnabout is fair play -- what book recommendations do you have for Bill?
At the top of my pick list for personalized learning advocate Gates would be Brian Dear's remarkable The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, with its tale of how a group of visionary engineers and designers -- some of them only high school students -- created a shockingly little-known computer system called PLATO in the late 1960s and 1970s that was decades ahead of its time in experimenting with how people could learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected terminals and computers. After all, "we can't move forward," as Audrey Watters argued in The Hidden History of Ed-Tech, "til we reconcile where we've been before."
At the top of my pick list for personalized learning advocate Gates would be Brian Dear's remarkable The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, with its tale of how a group of visionary engineers and designers -- some of them only high school students -- created a shockingly little-known computer system called PLATO in the late 1960s and 1970s that was decades ahead of its time in experimenting with how people could learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected terminals and computers. After all, "we can't move forward," as Audrey Watters argued in The Hidden History of Ed-Tech, "til we reconcile where we've been before."
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What the hell. Why are you posting this shit in multiple unrelated postings?
Recommendation (Score:2)
The smell of ancient keyboards (Score:3)
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Core memory is just as great.
Sometimes it wasn't so great. Our entire PLATO installation was down for about a week after a storm that caused electrical power surges which somehow fried the decades-old core memory in the mainframe (although one would think that stuff would be resistant to getting zapped). Apparently, the memory in question was no longer readily available.
It is kind of amazing that the system supported about 400 interactive users on graphics terminals, all simultaneously sharing a single processor with compute power that
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A Troublesome Inheritance (Score:1)
I'd recommend A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade. [amazon.com]
Maybe then he'd stop wasting his money on doing things that can't be done, and spend his money on something sensible such as spaceflight, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
I'd reccomend Inadequate Equilibria (Score:1)
Inadequate Equilibria is a (freely available) online book about how and why our civilization succeeds at some things, such as predicting the future value of Microsoft stock, and fails at others, such as determining the optimal diet to remain healthy. It's one of the most interesting books I've ever read.
PLATO? (Score:2)
PLATO (Score:1)
Bill Gates' first question:
"How can I make money off it?"
AC
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"... so that I'll have more money to funnel out of the nations which gave it to me."
FTFY.
Plato Terminals (Score:3)
Got them home and found out they had pulled all the display cards out. Otherwise they were complete. But Control Data kept any information and the cards themselves in-house. We were never able to do anything with them or get a hold of any display cards/information
PLATO I Hardly Knew Ye (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah PLATO - a system I knew about back in the day, and which we actually had some terminals for on campus (down in the medical research center on campus) and which I spent most of an academic year trying to find someway to gain access, unsuccessfully! I had the endorsement of a couple of professors, and a upper division research course to provide justification, but - nope, no way to do it. They were installed as part of grant program to the medical center, and although no one was even using them I couldn't even see the terminals, much less touch or use them.
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I think what we can learn from the past is that simply that motivated students are going to learn anywhere, and less motivated students are not going to be more engaged just because throw new technology at them. I am a practical person so I learn when I solve p
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I'll counter with some proof: a local high school identified the most "at-risk" students it had, mostly by attendance records. It then took the worst of the worst and put them in a special class. They had one instructor, who made them a deal: if they spent the mornings on self-paced learning modules in PLATO,, he'd teach them how to make video games in the afternoons (and allow them to PLAY video games as well). The end result? That class went from the MOST at-risk to the LEAST at-risk in one year. The self
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The senior software engineer in the communications and networking group at Data [Soul of a New Machine] General was an MIT dropout. Really smart guy and a genuinely nice person as well. Very smart people are sometimes bored with the pace of school.
Hi, Larry!
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Reaching th
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Access to terminal was the major hurdle these days, very true. The queue books, the limits "one hour per session", people hanging over your shoulder, counting minutes till your turn, and, finally, the green glimmer on your screen.
Wired article (Score:4, Interesting)
I got to play with a Plato terminal on a college campus around 1979 or so, it was really cool. Way beyond anything the standard campus terminals could do.
Years later I stumbled across this article:
https://www.wired.com/1997/03/platofest-to-celebrate-first-online-community/ [wired.com]
I didn't recall the name Brian Dear, but he was interviewed:
“I was given a tour of the Chemistry Learning Center today, to a room where there had been PLATO terminals,” Dear continues. “The cable for the terminals was literally hanging from the wall, the terminals have been replaced by IBM PCs, and the students were using the Web. With PLATO, if you asked a question, you got an answer back in less than a second. If you ask a question on the Web, it can take as long as 15 or 20 seconds to get your answer, while the Net clunks away. The students were falling asleep. I asked myself, ‘Is this progress?’”
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Yeah, I get the essence of his complaint. Progress should mean better results, faster.
Two caveats might apply to that anecdote, though... one being the increase in availability of broadband after 1997, and the other being sheer number of users trying to access the same resources. I'm sure part of the reason Plato was fast was because it had relatively few users.
Still in my life (Score:2)
I had an author signon in the University of Maine group (mainei) which I lost when I annoyed many participants in the =events Notes forum. They were angered by my expressing Conservative views, and caused much trouble. Annoying sysops can lead to entire systems being deleted. I surrendered.
But I played a lot Avatar, lots. Among other things, Avatar had an in-game chat system most useful for players to organize and accomplish what they could not alone. But it was multipurpose.
I found that my afternoon sessio
The Divine Comedy (Score:2)
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If I recall correctly, the language PLATO was programmed in was called 'Tutor' and the individual programs were called 'lessons'.
Yup. And when DEC came out with their "Dimension Author Language" (quickly "Courseware Author Language" after a copyright complaint from AT&T), it was a pretty obvious copy of Tutor, right down to the dotted-indent scheme. I don't know if DEC had licensed Tutor from CDC and just tarted it up or if they just blatantly ripped it off, but it was nearly identical. We have to use special GiGi terminals (with faux-vector graphics) to work with it, Kind of fun, but it never got any traction and I think DEC dro
A Quote Recommended By PLATO (Score:2)
Here is my problem with books (Score:2)
"I should have done it earlier. It's so nice to crawl into the chair with the tablet/hardcopy and just go through it".
First paragraph.
"Hmm.... Is that true? Let me Google this up.... "
and we are done. I know, I have an attention span of the teenager.
PLATO was a Big Deal in 1976 (Score:2)
When I graduated from UMass/Amherst, we had just installed a new-to-us (we got a good deal on someone else's upgrade) CDC Cyber-74. We had no PLATO terminals, but the CDC people were milking it for all the advertising value they could get out of it. I worked in the Computing Center, and took the required assembly language programming course on that monster. 60-bit word and hardware floating point was a Big Deal.
Why, yes, I *am* an antique technology junkie. Took a programming (wiring) class on the IBM 402
Back to the Future! (Score:1)
PLATO and Microsoft are related (Score:1)
Back to the original post, I am certain that Bill Gates, and Steve's Job and Wozniak, were both intimately familiar with the PLATO system. In another great book about the era, "Dealers in Lightning" about the team at XEROX Parc, in Palo Alto, "Early in 1972, researchers
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You are likely correct. No official visit or tour, as is the case with Jobs and Atkinson from Apple in 1979. I don't have my copy of the "Dealers in Lightning" at the moment but I thought I remembered Gates being offered a tour.
A year and a bit later, Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi from Xerox, where he'd been working since 1974 on WYSIWYG wordprocessor software. Simonyi was hired "to port the Alto's Bravo word processing software to other personal computer platforms under the name Microsoft Word." quote
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Memory ! what it used to be.
That was a great read.