The Plato system

When contemplating spending some fairly serious coin on that IBM system earlier this week, a friend asked "which systems/machines out there would you pay 'real' money for?" Since I'm not a Big Iron collector, and I'm used to spending no more than $10-20 on any given piece, that's a fair question for me. Maybe a Symbolics Lisp machine. Maybe an original Sun machine, or even a 2-series. A Xerox Alto. Historical stuff like that. Then I remembered when my high school class took a trip down to the U of I at Champaign-Urbana for "Engineering Open House" and I was sat in front of this monstrous wooden terminal with beguiling orange vector graphics. Only many years later did I learn what it was, and where it fit in the timeline of computing (thanks in part to Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" books.) So...who has one? What's become of the remaining infrastructure? I recently used a Windows Plato client to connect to some descendant of the system, but I asssume even the back end was running on modern hardware then, and not old Data General equipment. -j -- Retrocomputing and collecting in the Chicago area: http://chiclassiccomp.org