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Latest Update -
2 October 2007: I will be attending the Control Data Corporation 50th Anniversary Celebration in Minneapolis, MN on October 12th, 2007. Hope to meet a lot of former PLATO / CDC folks there! Click the link above to get more details on the event. 24 September 2007: What a delight -- today I got an email from Mark A. Johnson, the creator of the famous PLATO game Drygulch. I've been trying to track him down since the mid 1980s. Hoping to schedule an interview with him to learn more about the makings of Drygulch. 14 June 2007: I created a PLATO Users Group on Facebook. Join it if you use Facebook, and spread the word! 23 March 2007: To answer qustions from various folks about this project. Yes, I'm still here, yes it's still absolutely underway. It's not received 100% of my time in the past year as I've been busy hatching a startup company. I learned recently that there's a plan to have a 50th Anniversary Celebration of Control Data Corporation in October 2007, and I've become a tiny bit involved in that project. I am also still very interested in putting together a PLATO conference at the Computer History Museum, probably in 2008 (two short years away from PLATO's fiftieth anniversary - can you believe it?) As for whether I'm still collecting stories, anecdotes, etc., ABSOLUTELY YES, please, feel free to write to me early and often. 18 December 2006: Congratulations to Richard Powers, who was awarded the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. I had the pleasure of spending the day with Richard wandering around the campus of the U of I a few years ago, discussing his time on PLATO and what the PLATO scene meant to him. 21 August 2006: William C. Norris, founder and former CEO of Control Data Corporation, and a staunch champion of the PLATO system, passed away today at the ripe old age of 95.
By the way, I'm at a conference today (PC Forum) and one of the presenting companies is Novatium, which caught my attention because they're releasing two new products that might ring a bell: "Nova netPC" and "Nova netTV". When I heard that I thought, wait a sec, Novanet? Attention Pearson Education Technologies, white courtesy phone... 5 August 2005: Long time no update. A quick message to all the folks who've been emailing me over the past few months. Often I'm so busy I'm not able to provide a timely reply, and I apologize. Extremely busy these days, not, unfortunately, with the PLATO project but with startup business stuff. However, I'm absolutely committed to getting this PLATO story told and publishing it online as soon as possible. To everyone who's been asking if I'm still interested in receiving anecdotes, stories, photos, etc., the answer is YES, absolutely. Your recollections are all valuable. So please, keep 'em coming, and I do intend to write back to each and every one of you who's been emailing me stories and such. 11 March 2005: Ray Ozzie does it again: Microsoft Buys Groove Networks, and Ray is named MSFT's third CTO, and will report directly to Bill Gates.
On another note, folks have been asking about the status of the project and whether I am still researching and writing. Yes and yes. I'm working fulltime now so the book project gets attended to when I have spare time, primarily weekends. 6 December 2004: Ray Ozzie writes in CNET News about how tomorrow, Dec 7th, is the 20th anniversary of his founding Iris Associates, which was the tiny operation that created Lotus Notes. 28 August 2004: Michael Cochran and a group of PLATO oldtimers have been working on an interesting project to "reanimate" PLATO as it existed in the early 1980s. They evidently managed to get the legal rights to a lot of TUTOR code, including games like Empire. Recently they announced the system in the "PLATO" community within the Orkut social network. The URL is: www.cyber1.org. Go there and you can read all about it! I love the fact that this new CYBER-emulated system is all running on . . . a Macintosh. 5 August 2004: Good article in today's New York Times by Katie Hafner on how spam filters sometimes delete false positives, and the resulting consequences for those who never knew that someone had sent them some email. I bring this up because I fear this has happened and is still happening from time to time with folks trying to email me regarding PLATO. I make an effort to reply to every email I ever get that's not spam. If you've ever written to me and not heard back, it may very well be that I never saw your message, as it may have been deleted by my ISP's spam filters. If it's important, I'd suggest trying using a different email address and resending. Worst case, you can try emailing me at brian at well dot com and if you do, be sure to include the word "PLATO" in the subject line. Thanks!
14 June 2004: Wow, time flies. I'm still here. Still at it. That's all for now. 28 February 2004: I got an email just now from Steve Okonski mentioning the fact that Silas Warner passed away. There's a thread on Usenet about it. Evidently he passed away on the afternoon of the 27th. According to this 2001 posting by Silas himself, he had been in failing health.
He originally started working on PLATO in the early 1970s at Indiana University, where among other things he was the proctor for a PLATO terminal classroom. I interviewed him in 1997. He told me this about his discovery of PLATO and the fun things you could do with it: I got onto the PLATO system, and started making it do things, um, and of course discovered, as many other people about the same time were discovering, that they THOUGHT they had invented an educational computer, when IN FACT what they had actually invented, was the greatest pinball machine ever created up to that time!Another thing we talked about was the PLATO IV terminal and its color microfiche slide mechanism that required compressed air to work. Like many early PLATO IV classrooms, this one had tanks of compressed air in it. Here's a snippet from the interview:
So, there I was, I'd come in, and I'd try to work on the lesson at night, and the air bottles would always be empty. And . . . also the students would come in and the air bottles would be empty and they couldn't run their lessons. So what I finally ended up doing was inventing the "Backup Non-Automatic Microfiche Propulsion Module." What I did is, I'd take the hose off the slide projector and hook it to a bicycle pump . . . and the sign on the student terminal would read, IF SLIDE PROJECTOR STOPS, TAKE FOUR STROKES ON BICYCLE PUMP, AND GO BACK TO YOUR LESSON.It worked! Goodbye Silas, rest in peace. 28 January 2004: Orkut's back up. Email invites going out now. 24 January 2004: I've created a PLATO community area on Google's new invitation-only Orkut social network. I notice there's also a U of I alumni community forming there as well. If any PLATO alumni are interested in joining Orkut, just email me at and I'll send you an invite. It'd be fun to see a lot of PLATO folks turn up there.
- - - - - - P l e a s e N o t e - - - - - 2 January 2004: Very saddened to learn today that Dave Andersen passed away late last month, in Duluth, MN. I interviewed him for two hours on November 20, 2003, in part about his work on TERM-talk, which he released to the PLATO community on December 19, 1973. Dave was one of the leading systems software developers on PLATO for many years. I'm sure he's going to be missed by a lot of people. 26 November 2003: Been a while since I posted an update. Busy working on book. One question for PLATO users in the 1970s: does anyone remember any incidents of SPAM in Personal Notes? I'm curious to know if there was any spam-like behavior -- inappropriate commercial-type messages sent to people via p-notes. I'm guessing not, but it's worth finding out for sure. If you have any info/anecdotes, please let me know, thanks! Meanwhile. . . here's what the Welcome Page looked like some thirty years ago on PLATO:
Compare this to Google's logo today:
 13 October 2003 --- Back from a conference in Northern California. While on the trip I managed to get a quick tour of the shiny new Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It's in a landmark former Silicon Graphics building that was once listed in 2001 for sale for $41 million. Now it's the home of the Computer History Museum --- and it's a magnificent facility. (I'm sure I'm not the first to contemplate the fact that the building itself is part of the history --- of better times during the 90's Silicon Valley boom.)
 Composite outdoor view of CHM's entrance.
The parking lot was empty on the Friday afternoon I pulled in. The receptionist inside was kind enough to lead me to the locked entrance to the exhibit hall, wherein a guided tour was already taking place. I was very impressed with the new exhibits. The CHM staff have done a fantastic, professional job.
 Composite view of some of the many exhibits at the CHM.
There's an IBM 360, the Johnniac, some Cray computers, a wall full of every micro imaginable. There's an Apple I on a pedestal. There's a CDC6600, including the signature dual-eyed console. There's a huge SAGE exhibit. They even have sizeable chunks of the ILLIAC IV, but not the ILLIAC I (on which the earliest prototypes of PLATO ran). Everything you'd expect in a well- equipped museum of computer history. Well, almost everything.
 More aisles of exhibits at the CHM.
Making its way through the impressive exhibits was a small tour group led by a CHM docent named Allen Rosensweig. At a break point in his lecturing, I privately asked Mr. Rosensweig if there were any exhibits on PLATO anywhere in CHM. He looked at me with a blank expression, and said, "No." I asked if he was familiar with the PLATO computer system. Had he ever heard of it? Again, he said, "No." He then moved on with the tour group. This is going to change. It's incidents like this that remind me how important it is to get this book done, so the public finally has a chance to appreciate and understand the significance of the PLATO system. So when tour groups come into the museum, they won't even need to ask where the PLATO exhibit is, because it will be the featured exhibit and the one that everyone comes to the museum to see in the first place.
2 October 2003 --- It was a year ago today that the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Emmy Awards to Don Bitzer, Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson. Thirty years ago today, the TUTOR commands -okword- and -noword- were released. 3 September 2003 --- Last month marked the thirtieth anniversary of PLATO Notes, released 7 August 1973, and written by Dave Woolley. This December marks the 30th anniversary of TERM-talk, PLATO's instant messaging capability. From here on out, there will be numerous 30th anniversaries of interesting capabilities on PLATO, happening every few weeks or months.
13 August 2003 --- Work continues briskly on the book. Doing more research in Illinois later this month. No word yet on when the book will be out.
26 June 2003 -- Everything you ever wanted to know about the computer game Wizardry is available at a Wizardry fan website created and maintained by one John Hubbard (aka TK421). Hubbard's site is remarkably detailed and comprehensive. Wizardry is significant in the PLATO story because the authors, "Trebor" (Robert Woodhead) and "Werdna" (Andrew Greenberg) were PLATO users at Cornell University who soaked up many an hour in Oubliette, Empire, and other notable PLATO games. Indeed, there is much that is similar between the old Oubliette on PLATO and the Wizardry which originally appeared on Apple IIs, an observation which has been repeated to me quite a few times in interviews I've done over the years. Wizardry was a hugely popular game on Apples and later PCs. 25 June 2003 -- Not much news these days, just work. I did notice that Microsoft has put up a page about my PLATO presentation at Stanford University. Links to the video of the presentation are available at this Multi-University Research Laboratory Seminar Series page that Microsoft's sponsoring. 9 May 2003 -- Windows streaming video of today's PLATO lecture at Stanford University is available here. Requires Windows Media Player and 128kbps or higher bandwidth. 5 May 2003 -- Announcement of another lecture on PLATO, this one at Stanford University, on Friday May 9th. I'll be speaking at Professor Terry Winograd's CS547 "People, Computers, and Design" lecture series. The title of my talk is "Lessons Learned: Interacting with the PLATO System" and I'll review the factors that gave rise to early forms of human interaction via computer, including email, chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, interactive storytelling, and MUDs and other multiplayer games, all from the early-to-mid-1970s. It's at 12:30pm in the basement of the Gates Computer Science building on the Stanford campus, and runs until 2:00pm. Hope to see you there! 25 April 2003 -- Just a reminder about the upcoming lecture on PLATO I'm giving at a colloquium session at Sonoma State University on May 1st, 2003. SSU is up in Rohnert Park, CA near Santa Rosa. Hope to see lots of you there! 16 April 2003 -- Whew, a whole month has passed. It's been busy. Hey, I need help: I need a photograph of CERL building (252 Mathews Ave) as it existed before say 1994, whenever it was that the University tore down the tall radar/microwave tower that stood next to the building like the steeple of a church. If anyone has a photo that shows the building and the tower, and can possibly make a digital scan and email it to me, I would really appreciate it. Please let me know by email to Email me at Thanks!!! 12 March 2003 -- That used CDC PLATO terminal finally sold on eBay, for $72.11, which I still maintain is about $62.11 too much money. I also suggest the successful bidder donate it to the Computer History Museum; doing so would probably increase their PLATO holdings by at least 100%. :-) 6 March 2003 -- University of Illinois' ECE Alumni Newsletter has a nice article on Bitzer et al winning an Emmy for the plasma panel invention. 2 March 2003 -- What appears to be a CDC IST-II PLATO terminal, or perhaps it's an IST-III, is currently listed on eBay for sale by auction. Starting price is $50, which in my opinion is about $45 too high, considering how little use the terminal has. As Indiana Jones might say, "it belongs in a museum." Especially since neither the Computer History Museum or the Computer Museum of America have anything like this. (Try it some time: go to either museum, walk up to a docent, and ask to see the exhibits on PLATO. "Exhibits on what?" the docent will ask...) 22 February 2003 -- An old photo of one small portion of the documents, books, and other materials collected for research on the book so far. Hopefully the next book will be fiction... 14 February 2003 -- I'll be giving the first public lecture on the research I've been doing on the history of PLATO at a colloquium session at Sonoma State University on May 1st, 2003. Thanks to George Ledin, Chairman of the Department, for inviting me to speak. Hope to see lots of you there! (Click on the link for details) 29 January 2003 -- Joe Maia, who used to use PLATO at the University of Delaware, writes to tell me that this site is mentioned in an article in New Scientist magazine, relating to the AOL instant messaging patent (and no doubt my discussion of it and PLATO's TERM-talk feature). Can someone scan in the article and email me an image file? I'd love to see it. 21 January 2003 -- Not much new to report; busy writing the book and dealing with the business-end of the book (i.e., dealing with agents, proposals, pitches, you name it). I've also been busy with follow-up interviews. 23 December 2002 -- I'm trying to locate a particular PLATO user, probably a student at the University of Illinois circa 1973-74, who was an avid theatre-goer, someone who apparently regularly attended plays and theatrical productions and may have written reviews of them online in notesfiles or in the Red Sweater News Service. This person was apparently the one who went down to the little theatre in Sullivan, IL in 1974 for a production of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in which none other than Leonard Nimoy was starring. This person then met Nimoy after the show and invited him to come to CERL for a demo of PLATO -- and Nimoy accepted the invite! Do you know who this person was? Do you have any details? Please email me at if so. Thanks! 19 December 2002 -- Added a page about TERM-talk: PLATO's Instant Messaging to mark the 29th anniversary of its release . . . Follow-up at 16:30: Whoops, this site just got slashdotted again. 18 December 2002 -- It was 29 years ago tomorrow that Dave Andersen posted the following message in the =announce= notesfile on PLATO, announcing the availability of TERM-talk, PLATO's instant messaging capability. Funny, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just granted AOL a patent on instant messaging. Funny how that works...
7 December 2002 -- I've been doing some more interviews lately, including a wonderful discussion earlier today with novelist Richard Powers, who, it turns out, was a PLATO user at the University of Illnois in the 1970s, and says that PLATO was "absolutely formative" for him, having a major impact on his thinking and writing. 1 December 2002 -- Hard to believe December's already here. Work on the book continues, seven days a week, night and day. Continued thanks to the hundreds, probably thousands by this point, of people who have given so much of their time to help me with background information for the book. Keep those cards, photos, videos, brochures, journal articles, newspaper clippings, anecedotes, personal recollections, and emails comin'! Be sure to visit the December 1st New York Times for an article by Ray Ozzie on his early exposure to PLATO and how it inspired him to create Lotus Notes.
14 October 2002 -- If you've been trying to access this site over the past
24 hours, it's been down. Hard disk crash. The good news was that I had
a backup from the 12th. The bad news is that the server is 500 miles away
at a colocation facility. Long story short, the site is back up!
12 October 2002 -- If you've been following developments of this site for a while, you probably noticed it changed today. The homepage was simply too big, so I broke the site up into multiple pages, and added a few more illustrations here and there. 12 October 2002 -- A half-hour public radio program, called "The Magic Box," recently aired on the history of businesses marketing computers to the schools over the past 40 years. Incredibly, PLATO doesn't figure into the story. It's not mentioned even once. Nada. Zip! Control Data's ever-so-briefly mentioned in passing, 24 minutes into a 27 minute program, and then only after GE, IBM, Apple, Atari, Philco-Ford, Univac, and Tandy. Did PLATO ever exist? Listening to this program, you'll come away thinking sure, that's that old Greek guy, right? The one who hung around with So-crates. Dust, wind, dude! Instead, what listeners hear is an IBM and Apple story. Early on, Sidney Pressey's mentioned (quite interesting info, actually), but alas, that lesser contributor to programmed instruction, oh, what's-his-name, umm, oh yeah -- Skinner -- is not. Things like accuracy and chronology? Not factors in this radio program. Listen how the program conflates the IBM 1500 system (a 1960s product) with competing with Apple's efforts to sell its personal computer in schools. It's like listening to a radio program about the history of American Politics over the past 40 years and not hearing one mention of Nixon or Watergate as if neither ever existed. 11 September 2002 -- Once again, NovaNET's under a new corporate umbrella: NCS Learn is no more. The new company is called "Pearson Education Technologies." Hmm, PET. Where have I heard that before? 30 September 2002 -- Don Bitzer heads to New York this week to receive a special Science and Technology Emmy Award for his work in creating the flat-panel plasma display screen. Congrats, Don! 29 September 2002 -- Anyone remember Priscilla Obertino, author of lesson =glumph=? Glumph was a multimedia lesson that showed off the slide projector and touch panel capabilities in the form of a children's story. (Looking at it all these years later it's interesting as an early example of interactive, nonlinear "digital storytelling.") I'd love to find Ms. Obertino. Anyone know where she is now?
20 September 2002 -- Receiving lots of email this week -- many folks asking if I'm still collecting anecdotes or personal recollections of their time on PLATO. Yes. Here are things I am especially interested in:
19 September 2002: Looks like the site just got Slashdotted again, big-time. More traffic to the PLATO smileys & emoticons page. There's much more to PLATO than that, let me tell you. :-) 15 September 2002: Good grief: the amount of activity on this website this weekend is unprecedented thanks to links from The Register, Dan Gillmor, Slashdot, Coudal, BoingBoing.net, Heise.de, and countless other blogs and websites. Wow!
23 August 2002: Funny how I still bump into PLATO folks here and there. Saw Nate Syfrig posting a note today in a mailing list,
and had to email him to confirm if he was indeed nate/iu/cerl. Yes he was. Work continues on the book, the book proposal, and agents and publishers.
Lots of stuff going on; hope to have some news in September.
15 July 2002: Do you remember PLATO Press International from 1974? It was edited by George B. Myers. If you have info, anecdotes, printouts, whatever, please contact me. Thanks!
13 July 2002: Home from long 16-day cross-country trip. Did more interviews, more info-gathering.
Enjoyed Papa Del's pizza while in Urbana-Champaign, IL. While in town
I noticed there's now a sign outside the old CERL building on the U of I campus. Here's what it says:
 Strange, there were WAY more than 100 subjects. And why no mention of Daniel Alpert? 10 June 2002: I'm getting reports from a variety of sources that NovaNET is in trouble, its days possibly numbered. Please email me if you have any details on NovaNET and are willing to be a source for information, on or off the record. 26 May 2002: So Brian Gilomen tells me he was the lucky person to defeat the Doomsday Machine the first time it appeared in Empire. 11 May 2002: Finally have obtained a copy of the elusive RFC600, "Interfacing an Illinois Plasma terminal to the ARPANET," dated 26 November 1973, written by Art Berggreen. Thanks to Alex McKenzie of Rockport, MA for going out of his way to mail me a copy. It's somehow in keeping with the absurd obscurity of PLATO that this is the only internet RFC that is not availabvle on the web, out of 3000+ documents, the one that talks about PLATO is the only missing one. :-) 10 May 2002: Continuing to work full-time on book manuscript. Work also continues on the online participatory PLATO museum (timelines, photos, biographies, book excerpts, message forums, the works!) which will be housed at www.platofiles.org. |
|
Please please contact me if you have any PLATO-related slides or photographs
you're willing to contribute to the book and/or website! You can
email me at
. Thanks!
Special thanks to Jim Bowery, Stan Smith, Susan Rankaitis, Chuck Miller, Bill Lynch, and Ray Ozzie for photo contributions seen around this site! |
| Ok folks, the time has come to 'fess up. If you were an Empire player in 1976-77, and you were there the night that the Doomsday Machine was let loose in the game . . . I need your eyewitness testimony. :-) I am trying to figure out who was successful killing the DM. . . was it you? Let me know! Send me email: brian at platopeople dot com. Your assistance is gratefully appreciated! |
| If you ever saw a live PLATO demo in the 1960's or 1970's, given by Dr. Donald Bitzer, please email me! I'm trynig to collect recollections of these demos, that occurred all over the world. |
| If you used PLATO in South Africa, Australia, Israel, or Quebec, please email me with recollections! |
| The Graper Stories archive is available at http://www.grapenotes.com. NOTE: The image map problem has been fixed as of 5/14/2002. |
| I'm trying to locate Mark Johnson, a PLATO user who wrote a wonderful game called "Drygulch" that was available on CDC PLATO systems (not on CERL, I don't think). Do *you* know where he is? Did you play =drygulch=? Any info would be appreciated: please email me at . |
For those who don't know, Silas was a brilliant game designer, one of the original creators of Empire on PLATO. He also wrote Conquest, Robot War, and later on PCs, 
27 August 2003 --- Back from a 2-week, cross-country PLATO research trip with a long
stay in Illinois. Attended the "Emmy Open House" in Collinsville, IL (Don Bitzer's home town) on Sunday August 17th,
and snapped this picture of Don holding the Emmy Award he won last year as co-inventor of the plasma display panel.
I took my PowerBook, digital scanner, and digital camera on this research trip, and am now sorting through 700 digital
camera photos and 1800 scanned images, most scans of documents from the University of Illinois Archives (a completely paperless research
trip, how about that!). I think it's safe to say the research portion of this book project is 99% complete.
28 October 2002 -- Thanks to Bob Morris, former CDC exec, for sending a
whole slew of PLATO-era photographs, including a few depicting the ultra-rare Portable Plasma Panel terminal from the mid 1970s. Yes, that's a flat-panel display, and yes,
that's an acoustic coupler built right into the unit, which could fold down into suitcase form.
23 September 2002 -- Couldn't resist a little thumbnail image of Don Bitzer appearing on the
Phil Donahue Show in March 1981. (Yes, I have the video. And yes, I have the video of his
first appearance on Donahue in 1978. Donahue loved PLATO!) In other news, the Slashdot effect has worn off now
and the traffic to this site has calmed down but is still about 5 to 10 times what it was
prior to September. This month has seen over 35,000 unique visitors to this website. Wow!
These days NovaNET® is a registered trademark of Pearson Education Technologies.
These days PLATO® is a registered trademark of PLATO Learning Inc.
This page was last modified: 10 March 2007