[adam]

I would encourage anyone with a little extra time to read about the PLATO system. Truly ahead of its time, invented by an engineer at University of Illinois named Don Bitzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bitzer

I was fortunate to have a parent who worked for Dr. Bitzer and we had a PLATO terminal at home, hardwired in to the university mainframe at 1200 Bd. Played most of the games mentioned in the article along with Empire, a Star Trek-inspired multiplayer team game. Great memories.

[technofiend]

PLATO was absurdly fun. Houston Independent School District had a single terminal at each high school I attended and screen time was highly coveted. To the point that a friend of mine would sneak into school early just to get on, which promoted the administration to put a lock on the phone. Undaunted and despite more than one '9' in the phone number, we learned to dial by rapidly flashing the switch hook to simulate a rotary phone dial.

Thematically the school administration putting in what seemed like arbitrary rules just inspired us to work even harder to get access.

HISD also locked down "author" mode which was required to write new programs (called lessons) in PLATO's programming language named tutor.

Someone eventually cracked the account owners password, which is how some people ended up with accounts with author rights. We ended up replacing the login program on HSEP's PDP 11/34 so we always had super user privileges and I managed to socially engineer privileged access to our CDC mainframe. My flashhook dialing buddy figured out the system operators had buried end of file characters in the system docs on the CDC mainframe and we were able to find lots of interesting new commands to run after that. Again, telling us we couldn't do something just inspired us more. OK, upon reflection we were just hacking anything we could get our hands on.

Frankly I couldn't tell you exactly how I socially engineered it any more but I managed to track down an oil company here in town that not only had a PLATO terminal but a printer and gained access to both over the summer. Needless to say this was an amazing coup for a high school kid who just wanted to do a little coding and play a few games, if I say so myself.

I no longer have the long rolls of yellow paper from playing TREK and other games on an ASR 33 connected to the CDC mainframe or indeed anything else from high school, but the PLATO dot matrix screen print of Labyrinth's start screen remains a treasured possession to this day.

[cnasc]

http://friendlyorangeglow.com/ was amazing! Made me wish I'd been around to experience it.

[SpikeDad]

I waited a long time for that to be published and oh boy was it amazing. Anyone interested in origins of computing will find it fascinating.

[okareaman]

I would rank it #2 behind "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It's very well written and hard to put down.

[pinewurst]

Also "The Friendly Orange Glow" book (by Brian Dear) is outstanding.

[johnday]

That is exactly what the parent, to whom you responded, just linked.

[bbulkow]

I used Plato at udel , and had my first programming jobs there. It is hard to underestimate how far ahead they were, and that system influenced all my designs in my entire career.

Like realtime chat with any other user, character by character updates (what, you have to press enter to send? primitive!)

Friday afternoon dogfights used a lot of resources, but were super cool. Tens and maybe 100 users all in the same real time flight space, duking it out...

[irrational]

> what, you have to press enter to send? primitive!

Is that really good UX? I want to have a chance to fix my typos and other errors before sending.

[orbital-decay]

I find it awkward as well, but Google Wave worked exactly like this, and people praised it for this feature.

[cjauvin]

I think ICQ used to work like this too, and I remember how impressed by it I was.

[kingkawn]

Ahh the mountains of praise for Google Wave, I remember it well

[JeremyBanks]

It was ahead of its time.

[Someone]

Back in the day, most hardware couldn’t send data without having the user press ‘send’.

A shared system that could survive being interrupted whenever any of its users pressed a key still was relatively rare.

So I guess this might ¿partly? Have been to show of the capabilities of the system. At 1200 or maybe even 300 baud, it may also be the better UX, but I wouldn’t know.

[felixgallo]

The most that you could have in the dogfights would have been around 30 (if =empire) or about 5? (if =dogfight), and the definition of 'real time' was 1 frame every few seconds, as one might expect when you are limited to 10 TIPS (thousand instructions per second).

Empire was built around a 10 second replot mechanic and you frequently used the STOP button to stop the screen from drawing so you could get interactivity back quickly.

Realtime chat was amazing, especially with the ability to move characters around/erase characters with the pixel addressable 512x512 plasma screens; people would draw art by using characters, then moving the cursor back over them, and then erasing, or drawing in another character. O shift-space * shift-space ? would be O, * and ? on top of each other, which kind of looked like a smiley face. Fun times.

[dtagames]

My high school had one they left abandoned in an unused science classroom. Yours truly found many excuses for hanging out in there. When they found out I was actually using it, they left me alone.

This one was standalone, so a later model. Also the screen was bluish-white as opposed to the orange ones that I see photos of. All of the software was on floppies and much of it of the educational/industrial ilk. How to Not Kill Yourself With Chemicals, and So, You're a Sociopath. That sort of thing.

It was awesome.

[hundreddaysoff]

I have to ask. /So, You're a Sociopath/ was a game, an educational/instructional program, or both?

[dtagames]

It's a joke, of course. But there were a lot of "personality test" kind of things that were clearly meant for employer screenings. Hence, *So you're a Sociopath..."

[kens]

I saw a demo of PLATO in the 1970s and it inspired me for years about what was possible with computers. On the hardware side, it had a touchscreen which was remarkable back then, as well as the high-resolution graphics and flat plasma display. The software was also amazingly interactive. This was the era of punch cards, or a Teletype if you were lucky, so seeing the PLATO was like a vision from the future.

[qq4]

TIL more about plasma displays. Thank you Mr. Bitzer for helping create the television I enjoy so much.

[Animats]

The early plasma displays were basically a big array of neon lamps. Coincident voltage on X and Y lines turned pixels on and off. A sustain voltage kept the lit pixels lit. The screen was thus its own memory.

IBM had big flat panel plasma displays in the early 1980s.[1] Early in the history of AutoCAD, a driver was written for one of those things interfaced to a PC. The slow update rate was a big problem for the cursor. Orange plasma displays struggled along for decades, but the slow refresh rate limited their usefulness.

[1] https://www.retropaq.com/the-miracle-of-gas-plasma/

[malwarebytess]

Please do consider sharing what you remember about these games, maybe with the author linked.