Personal Memories of PLATO

Some HHOLers have personal memories of PLATO which we try to capture here.

My personal PLATO memory is being taken during enrichment summer school to the front room of the regional crime lab building , where sat two or three coveted PLATO terminals with amber monitors and touch sensitive screens (pretty amazing for the late 70's) After three or four cryptic login steps, you would be able to play some educational games, but the things with cool sounding titles were restricted and one was not given a manual.

I was system programming on Purdue's CDC 6500 when the Plato folks from neighboring UIUC came to talk about hosting an astounding 1000 users on similar equipment.

Their trick was that all users ran one program, Tutor, and their kernel managed in memory a small block of live data for each user. They also devoted extended core storage to Tutor caching exploiting its low latency.

The PLATO IV plasma/touch terminal inspired me to think more about graphical representation and interaction. They demo'd a fly breeding experiment that capitalized on the terminal's programmable fonts. I did the font trick on the Imlac PDS-1.