19 Sep
2011
19 Sep
'11
3:55 a.m.
Amazing, I didn't realize any were still running. Last time I saw PLATO was in the
1970s. The terminals were touch screens, they blew everyone's minds.
19 Sep
19 Sep
10:19 a.m.
On 19 Sep 2011 at 7:55, Vintage Coder wrote:
Amazing, I didn't realize any were still running.
Last time I saw
PLATO was in the 1970s. The terminals were touch screens, they blew .>
everyone's minds. .
With plasma screens yet. I understood that the screen was much of
the cost of one of those terminals. It also ran at a weird (even
for the day) comms rate.
CDC had a difficult time marketing the thing. I remember one year at
NCC, the folks at the CDC booth looking bored with the attendees sort
of shuffling through. I noted that they had a PLATO terminal, so I
asked one of the booth jockeys if I could try it. I brought up
Airfight and immediately collected a crowd. The folks at the booth
were a little upset at the idea of playing a game, when they were
tasked with selling "serious" stuff and eventually they put a stop to
it.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
It must have been around 1976, as I remember looking at the then-new
IBM 5100 and wondering how anyone could stare at that tiny screen for
more than 5 minutes at a time.
--Chuck
11 a.m.
Amazing, I
didn't realize any were still running. Last time I saw
PLATO was in the 1970s. The terminals were touch screens, they blew .>
everyone's minds. .
With plasma screens yet. I understood that the screen was much of the
cost of one of those terminals. CDC had a difficult time marketing the thing.
The one place I saw them was a university, and if I remember right, it
wasn't even in the data center but in the Social Sciences building. I
believe the CDC machine itself was also over there. I guess they probably
got the whole thing on an academic grant, but they may have paid for it
"with your tax dollars". Either way, the stuff must have cost a fortune and
PLATO seemed to be targeted at academic settings.
I remember one year at NCC, the folks at the CDC booth
looking bored with
the attendees sort of shuffling through. I noted that they had a PLATO
terminal, so I asked one of the booth jockeys if I could try it. I
brought up Airfight and immediately collected a crowd. The folks at the
booth were a little upset at the idea of playing a game, when they were
tasked with selling "serious" stuff and eventually they put a stop to it.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
That's a good story. What a missed opportunity for those guys. They should
have hired you on the spot. I imagine Tekronix sold a lot of 4051s by
demoing that old golf game, it was superb. Sometimes simple stuff like
that gets a lot more attention than more arcane things. To sell 'em you
first have to get their attention.
1:36 p.m.
On 9/19/11 8:00 AM, vintagecoder at aol.com wrote:
That's a good story. What a missed opportunity for
those guys. They should
have hired you on the spot. I imagine Tekronix sold a lot of 4051s by
demoing that old golf game, it was superb.
A lot of GT-40's were sold because of Lunar Lander.
12:58 p.m.
Amazing, I
didn't realize any were still running. Last time I saw
PLATO was in the 1970s. The terminals were touch screens, they blew .>
everyone's minds. .
With plasma screens yet. I understood that the screen was much of the
cost of one of those terminals. CDC had a difficult time marketing the thing. I
remember one year at
NCC, the folks at the CDC booth looking bored with the attendees sort of
shuffling through. I noted that they had a PLATO terminal, so I asked
one of the booth jockeys if I could try it. I brought up Airfight and
immediately collected a crowd. The folks at the booth were a little
upset at the idea of playing a game, when they were tasked with selling
"serious" stuff and eventually they put a stop to it.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
That's a good story. They really shanked that one, they probably should
have offered you a job on the spot.
The PLATO system I saw was at a university. I don't know whether it was
donated or they bought it "with your tax dollars". They had a bunch of
those touch screen terminals lined up on conference tables. As I remember,
it wasn't even in the data center but the Social Sciences building and I'm
almost certain the CDC machine wasn't in the data center either. That was
an expensive setup to have stuff spread out all over the campus like that.
I don't know what they used it for aside from some AI research. I guess
stuff like that was always a hard sell. I wonder how many 4051 Tektronix
sold by demoing that old golf game. It was a hoot and probably more of an
eyecatcher than whatever the salesmen used.
Sorry if this is a duplicate, I emailed earlier but did not see it posted.
2:19 p.m.
On 19 Sep 2011 at 16:58, vintagecoder at aol.com wrote:
That's a good story. They really shanked that one,
they probably
should have offered you a job on the spot.
That wouldn't have set well--I'd left CDC not six months earlier.
What was remarkable about Airfight is that you were part of a
"squadron" made up of other (remote) PLATO users and could send and
receive messages during the progress of the game. Very forward-
thinking for the day and completely missed by most of the mavens.
I looked it up--PLATO used a comm link running at 1260 bps. That was
slower even than the INTERCOM linkups, which IIRC, ran at something
like 2000 bps.
Even with the money poured into PLATO, it was less of a financial
success than Ticketron (another CDC operation that arose out of the
CDC-IBM litigation of the late 1960s.
The PLATO system I saw was at a university. I
don't know whether it
was donated or they bought it "with your tax dollars".
One tidbit is that PLATO ran under the KRONOS operating system.
KRONOS was a derivative of MACE, an operating system written mostly
by Dave Callender and Greg Mansfield--mostly late night on the QA
floor at Arden Hills. Strictly a bootleg project, initially called
MACE (Mansfield's Answer to Customer Engineering). The "official"
CDC operating system for the 6000 series was SCOPE, which was heavily
oriented toward batch processing.
What followed was a product war of sorts within the company. SCOPE
and KRONOS were fairly compatible on the user program level, but each
handled internal operations quite differently. SCOPE was descended
from COS, the Chippewa Operating System and could be
run on the least-
updated CPUs around. It was almost entirely resident in the PPUs.
KRONOS, being a later system, used some of the later hardware
enhancements and had a sizeable CPU component. Because of this, it
could respond to an external request faster.
KRONOS became popular among university customers who tended to use
remote job entry and real-time terminals, while data center-type
operations made use of SCOPE. Eventually, a move to consolidate both
operating systems was made. Initially, SCOPE became known as NOS-BE
(Network Operating System, Batch Environment), while KRONOS became
simply NOS.
While the final product was known as NOS, it really had components
from both OS.
--Chuck
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