Talk:PLATO (computer system)

passwords on Plato and Lotus

When you log in on Plato IV, you see a random number of Xs for each keystroke of your password. I was tickled to see this in Lotus Notes. Does anything else now use that gimmick? —Tamfang (talk) 08:12, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

PLATO didn't actually use a Random number of Xs. The random number generator cosumed more processing power than was necessary. Instead the number of X's was based on a couple bits within the internal representation of the letter the user typed. Larryw24 (talk) 10:31, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh. Well, thanks for letting me cling to that illusion for another year. ;) —Tamfang (talk) 17:02, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Plato in K-12 education

There is no mention of the use of the Plato system in grade schools and high schools. I went to Booker T. Washington Grade School in Champaign and was on the Plato system in Kindergarten, 1st grade and 4th grade especially. In 4th grade, I remember playing the math games to learn fractions and test my basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division through cutting pizzas, making monster juice and various math races, among other games . . . all using a touchscreen - unheard of for years to come. I also first experienced the film player capabilities and heard the first talking Plato machine.

At the University High School at UIUC, Plato was a natural part of our life. We had classrooms and labs. It was mandatory to learn the BASIC language and program via Plato, as well as have various sign-ons at different levels - author mode, user mode, etc. We spent a lot of free time chatting to others around the world and playing two-player games via the Plato system.

I think the value of how how Plato was used for education is very important. Does this topic deserve its own page, or should it be a paragraph on the main topic page? (Not that I am completely qualified to write it, but I am willing to help.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sbwinter2 (talk • contribs) 03:57, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

You used BASIC on Plato?! What year(s) was that? —Tamfang (talk) 06:26, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

It was while at Uni High in Urbana in 1979/1980. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sbwinter2 (talk • contribs) 16:50, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

A TUTOR lesson ('basicx' if I remember right) allowed users (like Sbwinter2 above) to type in short (up to 90 lines) basic programs. It could 'compile' these programs into an internal P-code and execute the users's BASIC program by interpreting the P-Code. It was designed by Axel Schreiner who, at the time, was a Computer Science PhD student of Professor H. George Friedman. Later Schreiner was on the faculty of University of Ulm. I believe BasicX was operational by the fall of 1973. I was an undergrad student at that time and assisted in the development of basicx. Larryw24 (talk) 10:24, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

We visited Schreiner in Ulm in 1975, for whatever that's worth. —Tamfang (talk) 17:06, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I was also using PLATO in grade school, at South Side Elementary in Champaign, from 1978 to 1983 or so when South Side closed. After that I continued to use PLATO in my dad's office in the Math department, then at Uni High 1984 to 1990, for things like US History and more advanced math. The games were a wonderful way to learn basic math skills. Make-A-Monster, Pizza Factory, How The West Was One Plus Three Minus Two (or whatever the numbers were), all made learning fun. Does anyone know if this was one of the earliest uses of computer education in elementary schools? Either way, it was a major part of the system. The list of educational games was one of the longest lists of program types. Hmm...a lot of them were written by...Shannon Dougdale? Something like that, anyway. I think. Anyone know? Critterkeeper (talk) 21:39, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Talkomatic

Minor point: I believe talkomatic allowed 5 users to talk to each other simultaneously, not 6 as the article currently mentions. Talkomatic had roughly 5 channels. Each channel could hold roughly 5 (I believe it was exactly 5) conversants. The conversants could type simultaneously, and, on a per-character basis, their text would appear on the other conversant's screens. It was also possible for people to look in ("monitor") a channel without talking. People sometimes used the monitor feature when a channel was full. Monitoring could also be used when the channel was not full. Channels could be locked, for private conversation. There was also (possibly later) something called "minitalko". I do not remember exactly what that did. - ATBS 19Aug09 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.112.25.123 (talk) 10:15, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Argh, now I'm trying to remember what 'minitalko' was, and the memory is just out of reach! —Tamfang (talk) 17:01, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Thinking about that a little, it seems like minitalko might have given exactly one channel of talkomatic. It also seems like the inspect code to minitalko was open, intentionally, so people could clone it. I seem to remember it did get cloned a few times. But I am not at all sure about any of these things - I mention them because maybe they'll jog someone else's memory. Who wrote talkomatic, anyway? -- ATBS 20Aug09 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.112.25.123 (talk) 11:19, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Later: there is good talkomatic info here: http://thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm (including confirmation that there were only 5 channels). According to that page, Doug Brown wrote talkomatic. - ATBS 20AUg09 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.112.25.123 (talk) 11:26, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

It'd be nice if talkomatic had its own wikipedia page, especially in light of Google Wave. An article on cnn.com right now glorifies Google wave for having communication where other people's keystrokes show up in real time. Genius or not, talkomatic had that 35 years ago. 71.112.25.123 (talk) 09:34, 28 October 2009 (UTC)ATBS

internet PLATO?

[1] = same thing or not? —Preceding unsigned comment added by ILoveSky (talk • contribs) 01:00, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Assessment

First time I've done this but a request was posted by Kraftlos (talk · contribs) and I figured I'd give it a crack. I've given the article a C rating. There's lots of good material and it appears to be well cited. Some of the sections are long-winded. The External inks section needs to be thinned (see WP:EL). Organization of the article could be improved - I'd start by introducing some sub-headings. The article feels heavy on historical information and lighter on description of the system, capabilities and uses and other such facts. This is the first time I've heard of PLATO so don't feel comfortable giving an importance rating. --Kvng (talk) 21:31, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

My feeling is that it has a low importance rating, although this could be challenged if it is shown that PLATO produced a large base of ideas that resulted in later systems and products, as did the hardware and software developments at Xerox PARC. I first encountered PLATO while an undergraduate engineering student in the mid-1970s and was not favorably impressed. The educational material seemed rather shallow and even to the casual observer it was clear that developing educational material for the system was too expensive and time consuming — the average college instructor or professor would find it cumbersome and inefficient, compared to presenting lectures and distributing printed handouts. The hardware that I saw at the time also rubbed me the wrong way. It consisted of rather low-resolution neon-orange plasma displays with simple on-off capability per pixel, rather hard on the eyes compared to typical cathode ray tubes of the day or paper printouts. Neither students nor instructors flocked to CDC's cause, even though the university I attended used a Control Data mainframe for batch processing of academic programming assignments and exercises.—Quicksilver^{T @} 17:31, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

The PLATO network introduced a number of technologies that later evolved into now familiar concepts we use on the Internet. I grew up with instant messaging in 1980 (I'm not sure when it was actually introduced, I was 4 when I first got to use my dad's terminal) - this was almost 2 decades prior to AOL Instant Messenger. There were a number of other technologies that were first introduced on the PLATO network. If your experience was merely that of a student rather than an end user, I could see how you may have missed out on a lot. Personally, I feel that this article needs to be greatly expanded to properly document how revolutionary this was for the time, and how it shaped our Internet experiences today. I missed having a touch screen monitor that was part of the 2nd generation terminals until last year when I got one with my smartphone and tablet. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 56.0.143.25 (talk) 14:12, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Question about upper/lower-case letters

I notice that a lot of program names are written in lower case letters. Why is this the case? SharkD  Talk  03:41, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

All filenames were lowercase. —Tamfang (talk) 10:00, 10 September 2010 (UTC)