PLATO V Terminal

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Thu Jun 18 19:57:27 CDT 2020



> On Jun 18, 2020, at 5:53 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 6/18/20 1:19 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>> 
> 
>> Nice.  Yes, airfight and any number of other multi-user games -- a
>> thing made popular by PLATO and possibly originated there.  There is
>> a running PLATO system around, see www.cyber1.org for details.  Its
>> users normally use a terminal emulators, but real terminals can be
>> connected to it and a few are around that are set up that way.
> 
> In my collection, I've got a 5.25" (360K) floppy sent to me back in the
> day that has the PLATO software for the IBM PC.  Other than filing the
> disk away, I never thought to boot it and see what was there.
> 
> Still have the disk, though.  I don't imagine that it's particularly rare.

I don't know.  My PLATO experience predates the PC.  Are you sure that's what it is?  The later PLATO terminals (starting with the "PLATO V" one, in fact) had local execution capability, and some of them included a floppy drive for local program load.  Those would be essentially PLATO software executing on the terminal rather that at the host.  If so, recovering that information may turn up something not previously preserved.

If it is indeed a PLATO terminal implemented as PC software, you could hook it up to Cyber1.

	paul



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