
The Greatest Computer Network You've Never Heard Of - gdubs
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pa3vvg/the-greatest-computer-network-youve-never-heard-of
======
eesmith
It's PLATO.

Which was used in both my undergrad and grad schools. (Yes, one of which was
UIUC.)

~~~
gdubs
Does it live up to the recent new-found hype it's been getting? Do you have
fond memories of it?

~~~
eesmith
I was at the tail end of PLATO.

What I know about it at UIUC was that it was used for course information, for
quizzes and lab tutorials, and for grade books. The other school used it for
quizzes.

I never had the ability to author things in TUTOR.

I did have access to games and some other programs, but from what I recall,
the big excitement had long since disappeared. Bear in mind that students
might have a 386, VGA, and Sound Blaster, along with the ability to dial in to
the internet or to BBSs. Why would PLATO interest them?

The PLATO systems were expensive, so there weren't many places with them,
often staff or a tutor was present, and the rooms were locked at night.

Instead, more of my friends were using the mainframe for online chat. The
mainframe terminals (a few were even TTY, with paper instead of glass) were
much cheaper, so the terminal rooms were open 24/7.

The mainframe was also dying because microcomputers were getting to be more
powerful. I found out that I could compile one of my FORTRAN assignments
faster on my 8086 than the mainframe could.

A couple of years later, Gopher came out, and then Mosaic, and thus the modern
internet world was created.

You'll note that Mosaic was developed at UIUC, the same place as PLATO.

This has come up before, and the author of the book is an HNer. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6666430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6666430)
for an earlier discussion.

My experience with PLATO is one of the reasons why I knew that the push over
the last 10 years or so to MOOCs, and cyber schools, and other computer-aided
teaching, was nearly all hype. That is, if it were easy or as obvious as the
promoters implied, then PLATO should have figured it out 40 years ago.

