On 9 May 2007 at 13:33, Richard wrote: At one time CDC simply sold intact equipment for its scrap value to the usual dealers. What caused that to stop was the supposedly "scrapped" gear showing up at customer's sites. It dawned on CDC management that their scrap policy was having a negative effect on their bottom line. The word came down that ANY piece of gear leaving CDC was to be rendered to a condition that was unequivocally *scrap*. That meant that CE's spent their time taking sledgehammers to disk drives and reducing whole computer systems to dumpsterloads of mangled junk. Watching this happen was sickening, but I could understand the rationale. My best recollection was that this policy went into effect sometime around 1973-74, but Billy Petit could probably refresh my warped sense of the exact timeline. I wouldn't mind having one of the old plasma display Plato terminals, myself. It'd make a great night light. Cheers, Chuck

I managed to snag one of the plasma terminal modules (not the entire terminal - just the display guts with rear-projection screen) MANY years ago from Godbout. After acquiring it, I spend several weeks tracking down documentation and managed to obtain the manuals for the electrical and logic hookup, so "some day" I'm going to build me a terminal... a division of Corning. I'll dig up the docs and refresh my memory if anyone is interested. The module is about 12x12x8 inches, built mostly as a "square donut" with a recessed hole in the back where the rear-projection slide / reel machine would be placed. It's basically a 512x512 bit memory and is addressed digitally with a fairly simple parallel interface. What's kept me from powering it up is that it takes about four different (and some strange) voltages, one of which is about 180vdc for the plasma supply. Didn't want to power up until I had time to build supplies that conform to the specific requirements for slew and current limit. Didn't want "bad things" to happen on first power up. While a student programmer at Oregon State University MANY MANY years ago, I was involved in a project (never completed) that was to hook one or two of the terminals to our time-sharing system. Seemed to recall the "serial interface" level of the plato terminal required something like 18 bit "characters" sent TO the unit, with 12 bit "characters" coming FROM the unit. Was going to require some major work to force these through our 8 bit asynchronous frontend system. The "powers that be" decided it was too much effort and abandoned the project. -Gary

On 9 May 2007 at 16:42, Richard wrote: Yup. 6 bit display code (10 characters per CM word). Later, 12 bit codes were used to handle such niceties as lower case. (There were actually a couple of competing representational systems for the extended character set). A PP channel/word was 12 bit; PPUs had an 18 bit accumulator, however. Cheers, Chuck

In article <4642A3A6.5060602 at ao.com>, Gary Oliver <go at ao.com> writes: If Al's overloaded, I can scan them. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <200705100007.l4A07FA5015950 at floodgap.com>, Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> writes: In the PLATO system, you wrote software in a language specifically designed for the computer assisted instruction environment of PLATO. The language was called "tutor". A very brief entry about it is on wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUTOR_programming_language>. A book that describes the tutor language in detail is here: <http://www.group-s.net/TUTORLanguage.htm>. What I remember about "micro tutor" was that it was the same as the tutor language, with restrictions. IIRC, there was a size restriction and the syntax was also restricted in the sense that not all of the tutor commands were supported. I seem to remember that the terminal housed a Z80 inside and somehow the tutor language was being interpreted by the Z80 code or cross-compiled to native Z80 instructions. I never did know which, but I know you could load code directly into the terminal by writing it in ututor and loading it through the main PLATO system. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: When I was attending UIUC from 89-93, the PLATO terminals (the 80's era slanted boxes with the cream sides and the black-ish front) were still in heavy use in the Physics and Chem areas. However, since we were typical undergrads and waited until the last minute to finish the PLATO lessons, the terminals were always crowded, and Loomis Lab was locked up at 8 or so, meaning the terminals ere unavailable after that. During the 90-91 year, I stumbled upon a Commodore 64 software implementation of the base PLATO system, which could connect the servers using the university dialup (333-1100 or something). It was very impressive, as it ran at 2400 bps (tough to do on the C64) and rendered a good 320x200 representation of the 512-512 plasma graphics. It even replicated the orange-ish color of the screens. Sadly, I have not been able to locate the disk here since I left college. I'd love to locate a copy though. I did not know about the Atari cart, but I suspect the C64 version was probably some port of that code, since they shared a common CPU. It may have been a unlicensed port, since I've never seen an actual C64 pot listed anywhere. Jim -- Jim Brain, Brain Innovations (X) brain at jbrain.com Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times! Home: http://www.jbrain.com

On 5/10/07, Jim Brain <brain at jbrain.com> wrote: Memory flood! I don't remember those there....but I don't think I had any classes that used them. I just remember them from the Engineering Open House days (which would have been a similar period, probably 88-90.) They could very well have been those boxes rather than the wooden ones, which I've probably seen in pictures and inserted into my memories. Definitely had the orange plasma screens, though. My hangout was 8-English (wonder when the old-school terminals were finally removed? I still remember my uxa.cso.uiuc.edu login, and picking up my greenbar printouts in the mailtray next to the sysadmin's desk down there) and occasionally DCL... They had a couple NeXTs and an Amiga 500 on ethernet! Oh, the mighty speed of Kermit! Hmm....was that Winchester or Mossberg? ;) I've never seen the C64 implementation, but that's something worth finding. I know the Atari PLATO cart is pretty rare.

It was jaw dropping incredible stuff like this, that got me into the field. Funny thing now is, I'm so jaded by technology, so little gets me excited anymore with modern pc's and technology, but gimme a Vax or an Atari or the like, stuff is far more interesting and exciting. I think it has to do with how challenging it is to have these systems do what modern systems do transparently with little to no intervention. I always find it funny to see a modern day computer "engineer" -- ask them the mem port and irq of com1 on a PC and usually you'll get a stuttering response, blank stare or the typical - "well plug and play will set it up" --- technology has become so far removed from the user and even the tech, that many have no idea how the h*ll the things even function on the most rudimentary level. I love early "gee whiz" stuff, far more fun!!! Curt Chuck Guzis wrote:

Maybe that's why we do love this stuff! Greetings Alexandre PS: FB3? Will it happen? :)

In article <4642DBEA.14145.4EA00B at cclist.sydex.com>, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> writes: It was the genesis of: - computer based/assisted/automated instruction - interactive chat - messaging areas - online gaming - massive multiplayer gaming - graphical gaming So yeah, it was tremendously influential. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <007601c7933c$d2c0f3d0$6600a8c0 at BILLING>, "Jay West" <jwest at classiccmp.org> writes: s/the genesis/a major influence/ then. Either way, I don't think you can deny the impact of PLATO. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <464318FE.23726.13D366A at cclist.sydex.com>, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> writes: The messaging areas and chat were part of the instructional environment. You could take the lessons, but you could also participate in the discussions with the instructor and other students. When taking a lesson, you could request real-time chat from the TA in order to assist you with the lesson. I know this because I took courses that leveraged PLATO. UDel had the entire setup: the mainframe and the terminal rooms scattered around the campus. They even had musical tone generators attached to the terminals in the music building and you could use them (with headphones, to prevent you The institutions that owned their own Cyber mainframe obviously thought it was worth the cost. UDel and UIUC were two of the big installations, IIRC. That sort of critique could be applied to any computer-based learning, IMO. At least with PLATO, when done right, you could chat with the TA or instructor to get more information. Of course this had to be done during "office hours", just like with a physical instructor. I think UDel's answer would be yes. It was very heavily used. Many times the PLATO terminal rooms were full and there were several of them around campus. They were used for instruction in many subject areas, so it wasn't the pet darling of one department. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <4643317B.9243.19CDE5C at cclist.sydex.com>, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> writes: Whatever. I'm not claiming that PLATO invented these things but considering I never heard of an Intercom 200 terminal or SCOPE, but I had actively used PLATO in a large heterogeneous computing environment and PLATO was the only system to have chat and discussion forums, I'd consider it to have had a significant impact. Judging by the PLATO fan sites online I'd have to say that I'm not alone, either. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

There's a CDC Terminal and related ephemera, some of which at least mentions PLATO on eBay UK, 130113266639 -- Pete Edwards "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" - Niels Bohr

Jason T wrote: I remember some of the wooden ones. University High (the high school affiliated with UIUC) had some wooden ones in their lab. Uni High was a destination for chess matches in high school (I sucked at chess, but the local C64 heads went, so it was a cheap way to meet them each week or two). Having only seen PC-XTs and home computers, those slanted wooden beasts looked so foreign to me in 87-89. Little did I know I would be using them in 90. jlb31348 at uxa.cso.uiuc.edu. Google (via Dejanews) has most of my old postings under that ID. The accounts are coded. 3 initials, the year of creation (3rd year of offering student IDs, I believe), and a 4 digit number. As I recall, the student accounts ran on some multi-68K CPU unix box that was sitting in the basement of the Illini Union. I saw the behemoth while using the X terminals in that lab. Years before Vista eye candy, I remember folks writing elaborate scripts so they could have all their X goodies (xv, xeyes, etc.) come up on any X terminal anywhere on campus, whether it be the IBM RTs, the Sparcs, or the RS6000 units in DCL. I, sadly, was never that motivated, so I just xterm'ed and started things by hand. I think the box was a Sequent, but I'm not sure, memory is already fading. To get (somewhat) back on topic, I knew there were lots of discussion groups in the PLATO system, but UIUC was on NFSNet, and the dorm labs got IP before I arrived. After someone tipped me off to USENET, PLATO was relegated to schoolwork only. Oh, but 333-1100 coupled with Novaterm 8.X (or maybe 9.1) and my trusty 2400 bps Zoom modem saved my bacon all through the CS classes. Being able to code machine problems (MPs) from the room was pure nirvana. Novaterm's soft-80 mode and reliable 2400bpx routines made it a platform of choice. It sounds crazy, but I used that 64 for all my college work until late 1992. PLATO on the 64, MPs via Novaterm, and term papers via GEOS and my OKI180 printer. Jim -- Jim Brain, Brain Innovations (X) brain at jbrain.com Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times! Home: http://www.jbrain.com

Jason T wrote: More off-topic-ness. I 'admin'ed one of those labs in 1991-93, the one at Allen Hall. They were open 24/7. The PS/2 units were model 30s, as I recall, and barely ran Win 3.0. The Mac SEs were far more useful, but they had to have that crazy boot disk in the top drive, so each machine was fitted with the Mac "bra", as we called it, to keep the disk from fully ejecting. However, by the time I got there, the little foam insert in the bra that lets the disk partially eject but pushes it back in was getting worn out. Thus, I got called many times after people would reboot due to sad-Mac... Initially, I would use a key to unlock the bra padlock, use a hammer from the cabinet to nudge the bra off, put the disk back in, and re-install. However, I determined in a bit that you could just give the front of the monitor on the SE a good "whack" with your hand and the disk would pop back in. It worked with no ill effects, but it would greatly surprise the computer users when I would see a sad-Mac, go up, thump it hard, and go on my way :-) Again, trying to stay on topic, since I seem to be dragging it off... The UIUC data line was fronted by some traffic-cop thing that would dump you into NovaNET at the prompt if you typed plato or somesuch. Likewise, getting on the main network required a different keyword at the initial prompt. I used to script all of that, but I'd have to dig up the old NT (that's Novaterm, not New Technology) disks to be sure. NT was not out yet, but MS came to campus and did a dog and pony show for us about the benefits of it. In 1990, we ditched the 80186 3COM comservers (or whatever they were called) for OS/2 1.3, which was better, but the lack of a good PM (which came in 2.0, as I recall) made admining the environment tough. Truly, though, those PLATO systems were considered dinosaurs when I was there. CSO had 486s and such in the CSO labs, and the plasma screen made them a bit eerie. I always wonder why UIUC didn't switch to soft PLATO on the PCs. The Macs has MACTCP, and the PCs ran clarkson packet drivers and such. (Funnily, even though NCSA (at UIUC) begat NCSA Telnet, I think Clarkson improved it, and thedorm labs would install Clarkson Telnet in lieu of NCSA. Probably NCSA cared less. Sadly, as for PLATO technical information, I was only a user. The heyday for them had come and gone by the time I arrived at UIUC, and many of the units were in rough shape by then. Jim -- Jim Brain, Brain Innovations (X) brain at jbrain.com Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times! Home: http://www.jbrain.com

Chuck Guzis wrote: I can't. Why didn't they just resell the units? Couldn't they have gotten more than one sale from the same piece of hardware? -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/