Ebay - Neat PLATO system (AOL before AOL)

Back in the 80's, one of my roommates turned me on to Plato. We went downtown to get the terminal cartridge for the Atari 8-bit. We were short of money and Fred ended up pawning his watch to cover the cart. It was a pretty cool system. Regards, jeff -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-admin(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chandra Bajpai Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2003 8:41 AM To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Ebay - Neat PLATO system (AOL before AOL) This is pretty neat.A Plato terminal. I never knew a on-line community existed before Lee Feldstein's Community Memory project.In hindsight it looks like he was trying to copy Plato. A Description: Welcome to PLATO. The PLATO system, started way back in 1960, was developed as a technological solution to delivering individualized instruction, in thousands of subjects from algebra to zoology, to students in schools and universities across the nation. As the system grew and evolved, it became, pretty much by accident, the first major online community, in the current sense of the term. In the early 1970s, people lucky enough to be exposed to the system discovered it offered a radically new way of understanding what computers could be used for: computers weren't just about number-crunching (and delivering individualized instruction), they were about people connecting with people. For many PLATO people who came across PLATO in the 1970s, this was a mind-blowing concept http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem <http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3404078052&category= 4193> &item=3404078052&category=4193