Hacker News Comments on
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.That's awesome! Looking forward to it.What about the 'PLATO system'?
"Long before Facebook's and Google's founders were born, and before Microsoft and Apple were founded. Before Xerox PARC. Before the Web. AOL. Bulletin boards and CompuServe. Before the Internet. Long before MOOCs (massively open online courses). Before pretty much everything we take for granted today, there was the PLATO system: home of not only computer-based education but, surprisingly, the first online community, and the original incubator for social computing: instant messaging, chat rooms, message forums, the world's first online newspaper, interactive fiction, emoticons, animations, virtual goods and virtual economies, a thriving developer community, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers. PLATO is where flat-panel gas plasma displays come from, and was one of the first systems with touch panels built-in to the screen. Countless other innovations." [1]
The book 'The Friendly Orange Glow' by Brian Dear details all about it. He says it's "a book in the works for more than two decades. Based on extensive research, including interviews with hundreds of key individuals who designed, built, managed, sold, and used the PLATO system."
[1] http://friendlyorangeglow.com/
PLATO on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
Book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Orange-Glow-Untold-Cybercult...