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The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture Hardcover – Deckle Edge, November 14, 2017
Additional Details
The Friendly Orange Glow is the first history to recount in fascinating detail the remarkable accomplishments and inspiring personal stories of the PLATO community. The addictive nature of PLATO both ruined many a college career and launched pathbreaking multimillion-dollar software products. Its development, impact, and eventual disappearance provides an instructive case study of technological innovation and disruption, project management, and missed opportunities. Above all, The Friendly Orange Glow at last reveals new perspectives on the origins of social computing and our internet-infatuated world.
- Print length640 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPantheon
- Publication dateNovember 14, 2017
- Dimensions6.6 x 1.5 x 9.8 inches
- ISBN-101101871555
- ISBN-13978-1101871553
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—Phil Lapsley, The Wall Street Journal
“Brian Dear has made an important and fascinating contribution to the history of the digital age. This insightful book tells the story of the pioneering system of networked computing known as PLATO. Much of what we enjoy today sprang from PLATO and the colorful community that created and embraced it.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators and Steve Jobs
“That Dear was able to interview the many engineers, programmers, authors, and users of PLATO is a signal achievement. One might say that The Friendly Orange Glow is a kind of ‘fan non-fiction’; Dear is to PLATO what Chernow is to Hamilton. . . . Dear has done a great deal of heavy lifting here to tell a story that needed to be told and we are much the richer for his telling.”
—Steve Jones, New Media & Society
“A full decade before the history most people believe, PLATO was the original system that inspired modern computing—and even the cloud. Designed and built by Midwestern pioneers starting in 1960, PLATO was still operational when I attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the early 1990s. In fact, I took math classes on it before building Mosaic. This story is a testament to the importance of both innovation and timing!”
—Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
“I loved this deep unknown history. An incredible tale of a rag-tag team of students inventing key technologies—flat screens, instant messaging, networked games, blogging—decades before Silicon Valley, and then they were totally forgotten. Your mind will be blown.”
—Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick for Wired Magazine and author of The Inevitable
“Prodigious research. . . . The story shines through—a fascinating tale of missed opportunities and blind spots.”
—Sharon Weinberger, Nature
“Absorbing and eye-opening history. . . . Entertaining, anecdote-laden account waxes more than a little nostalgic about the little-remembered program . . . behind cyberculture’s flourishing global impact.”
—Booklist
“This exuberant history . . . offers a lively portrait of the energy and creativity that a networked world can unleash. . . . Dear’s sprawling re-creation conveys the excitement of technological innovation and the freewheeling eccentricity of this vibrant scene.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Promoted as an educational experiment, PLATO became home to the first interactive games, electronic communities, student hacking escapades and online romances. Could Nixon's staff censor online impeachment discussions? Is online gaming a form of education? Should systems sell advertising? Here’s the astonishing story of that first network—how students and programmers twisted a thousand clunky, connected computers to change the course of computing.”
—Clifford Stoll, author of High-Tech Heretic
“Packed with delightful details, The Friendly Orange Glow offers a fascinating account of how the first initial forays by passionate geeks snowballed to establish digital culture. This book is an essential read for anyone who takes the internet for granted.”
—danah boyd, founder of Data & Society and principal researcher, Microsoft Research
“The word that comes to mind about this book is comprehensive! It is truly a historical tour de force telling the story of the PLATO system, its origins and the people who made it happen. I had a glancing exposure to the program and Don Bitzer in the late 1960s as I embarked on work at UCLA on the ARPANET. The team was wrestling with the neon plasma panel display and I came away very impressed by Bitzer’s palpable can-do enthusiasm. He may have been Felix Ungar to Daniel Albert’s Oscar Madison, but I have never met a more determined engineer in my fifty-year career. This book is a timely reminder of what PLATO people astonishingly accomplished long before the rest of the world caught on.”
—Vint Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google
“Finally! Here is the secret history of the Internet’s elder sibling, the one no one talks about after a mysterious disappearance.”
—Jaron Lanier, author I Am Not a Gadget
“Long before ‘UI’ signified User Interface, ‘UI’ signified University of Illinois, where, fifty years ago, much of what we take for granted as a User Interface for personal and collaborative computing first took form. To an Internet user, The Friendly Orange Glow is like finding a trunk in your attic full of detailed notes kept by your parents chronicling all the adventures they had before you were born. This is history of the best kind: authoritative, intimate, and painstakingly assembled, firsthand. A landmark work.”
—George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Imagine discovering that a small group of people had invented a fully functioning jet airplane capable of flying long distances at hundreds of miles per hour, decades before the Wright brothers cast their fragile craft into the wind for twelve seconds over North Carolina sand dunes in 1903. Imagine how such a discovery would disrupt our common understanding of history. The story of PLATO, a computer system so far ahead of its time and perhaps the least known major twentieth-century technology project, may strike you as just as impossible as a nineteenth-century jet, but PLATO really happened. It is a story of inventors, mavericks, hackers, geniuses, visionaries, scientists, and educators who came together not so long ago in the very heart of the American Midwest, a story that so disrupts the conventional view of twentieth-century technology history that it may make you wonder, as it has made this author wonder, How could this have happened? Where are the books, the magazine articles, the documentaries, and the museum displays that should have covered this story? Why has this story gone untold? Why are we only finding out about this now?
Having begun using PLATO in 1979, as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, I developed an insatiable curiosity about who these people were. I wanted to understand where they came from. I kept asking myself, Why is the world ignoring this incredible phenomenon? After a number of years, I decided I was not going to wait any longer for someone to come along and write the history documented in this book, so I reluctantly set out to do it myself.
And here we are. What follows in these pages is an attempt to provide a glimpse into the largely unknown world of PLATO. As you read the following chapters, pay attention to dates. Considering what innovations are being described—many of them things we now use every day of our lives—it is hard to believe how many years ago these things came about, long before personal computing, social media, and the Internet existed. A book about the history of the PLATO system turns out not to be just about PLATO. It also sheds new light on the origins of diverse fields, from what we now call e-learning or personalized instruction, to flat-panel displays and touch-sensitive screens; from time-sharing to cloud computing; from MUDs and other multiplayer games to online communities and social networking. To absorb the history of PLATO leads to a better understanding and deeper appreciation of all these areas of innovation, and of the nature of innovation itself.
***
In the American study of economics there are two prevailing schools of thought, one called the “saltwater” view and the other called the “freshwater” view. The economic details of each view are unimportant here. What’s notable is that the saltwater view refers to the predominant economics mindset at universities and think tanks on the East and West Coasts of the United States. The freshwater view belongs primarily to Midwestern economists closer to Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, mainly at the University of Chicago.
Unlike in economics, in the popular history of computing there’s one prevailing view, and it’s a saltwater view: of, by, and for the two coasts, with its centers being Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whether the view was taught in school, broadcast on television, depicted in movies, printed in books or magazines, or published on the Internet, the view holds that most of the great American computer innovations of the twentieth century share one thing in common.: they happened on the coasts. The history of the last sixty years of computing, from mainframes to the rise of the Internet, from silicon chips to the revolution brought forth by the personal computer, to, in more recent years, the marvels of smartphones, portable digital music players, touch-based tablet computers, search engines, billion- user social networks, online stores—these are breakthroughs that came about on the coasts.
So used to saltwater stories of the Next Big Thing in technology are we that we have largely missed what went on between the coasts. To this day, many of these freshwater accomplishments have gone unnoticed.
We celebrate the rise of ARPANET, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. We celebrate the accomplishments of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, which in turn inspired Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh computers and much of the personal computing environments we still use today. We celebrate the innovations produced by legions of start-up companies and placed into the hands of millions, now billions of people: Innovations that have changed the world. Innovations people cannot imagine living without. We are living in the very “shocking future” Alvin Toffler wrote about—warned us about—forty-five years ago. And the history of how we reached this future has been researched, deciphered, studied, analyzed, organized, and disseminated far and wide for long enough that the story has become legend, set in stone. Nerds, geeks, and hackers are no longer outcasts and ridiculed; they’re now sought-after “thought leaders,” many counted among the tens of thousands of recent millionaires and hundreds of billionaires. The list of heroes’ names in the “computer revolution” is long. But there is an equally long list of unknown computer pioneers, the people whose stories fill the pages of this book.
***
To be in the great state of Illinois is to be hours away by jet, days by car or rail, from the West or East Coasts, each a thousand miles away. To be in Illinois is, instead, to be in the heart of the fruited plain, that vast prairie with soil so rich you could jam a broomstick into it and leaves would sprout. Some 80 percent of the state’s nearly 58,000 square and famously flat miles are devoted to farming, much of it corn and, in more recent years, soy. Endless farmland surrounds most Illinois cities and towns, which pop up like islands in a sea of green.
Out in the middle of that fruited Illinois plain there’s a place where a lot of the future we take for granted today got started, long ago. The town is Urbana, and the place is one of the largest universities in the United States: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On UI’s campus there’s one particular building that is at the very heart of our story. Most of the events chronicled in the pages that follow took place in this particular building, or if they took place elsewhere (sometimes clear across the world), they did so only because of prior things that had taken place in this building. What went on in this building changed lives. It may have changed yours and you don’t even realize it. What happened in this building changed the world. And unlike every other major technology story of the twentieth century, very few have heard of it: the PLATO system was born in this building.
The building’s PLATO presence is long gone, the names and numbers on office doors scraped off long ago. The mechanical engineering department took over the building years ago, filling remodeled offices with researchers working on everything from improving air conditioners to “nanoscale chemical- electrical- mechanical manufacturing systems.”
The brick-walled building, four narrow stories, stands alongside Mathews Avenue, a quiet tree-lined street running north and south through the campus. The building went up during a noisier, sootier era, when railroad tracks ran through the streets, upon which rolled trolley cars, horse-drawn delivery trucks, Model Ts, and steam locomotives. Outnumbering the trees, stark utility poles supported count-less power and phone lines in every direction. One track along the north side of the building crossed the street and led into a long- gone locomotive testing plant, complete with roundhouse, where engineering students worked on real trains and engine designs.
For more than half of the building’s hundred- plus years a tower of one sort or another loomed alongside it. In 1910, as part of the original construction as the campus power plant, there stood a 175- foot- tall brick smokestack along the south side, toward the rear of the building. The stack could be seen from miles away belching out thick, black billows of smoke from the coal furnace, boilers, and steam generators inside. But in time, the campus outgrew the power plant’s capacity, so a bigger plant was built farther outside town. The smokestack was torn down, the building’s length more than doubled, and soon another tower, for radar research, was constructed on its north side.
Doric columns on either side of the entranceway’s double doors support a simple stone entablature above, engraved into which are the words “POWER HOUSE.” It’s now the only hint of the building’s distant power plant past. If it wasn’t for a small historical marker right outside the doors, there would be no hint at all that this was also the birthplace of PLATO.
The doors open to a small landing and a few steps leading up to another set of double doors. The steps, and the walls halfway up to the handrails on either side, are covered in little stone tile squares varying in shades of faded orange and earth-clay brown. Up the stairs, through the doors, down the hall, there are offices and labs. In those rooms not so long ago, atop tables and desks rested computer terminals sporting impossibly futuristic, high-resolution, touch-sensitive, flat panel gas plasma displays from which emanated a light that was at the time commonly called the Friendly Orange Glow.
***
The level to which PLATO, its people, and its history have been ignored is extraordinary given not only how seminal the innovations were and how early its online community flourished, but also how recently it all happened. PLATO was a computer system, but more important, it was a culture, both physical and online, a community that formed on its own, with its own jargon, customs, and idioms; its own cast of thousands, a world familiar to us yet subtly foreign, an entire era that clashes with the accepted, canonical history of computing, social media, online communities, online games, and online education. It’s as if an advanced civilization had once thrived on earth, dwelled among us, built a wondrous technology, but then disappeared as quietly as they had arrived, leaving behind scraps of legend and artifacts that only few noticed. This book is the result of an effort to capture the history of this lost culture of innovation before it vanishes completely, by someone who had the great fortune to come of age, to “become digital,” as it were, within that very culture, thereby having a chance to get to know some of the people there, their stories, their visions, and their amazing technologies— technologies we all now recognize and use.
This book is as much the biography of a vision as it is the story of the people behind PLATO. Every technology story, whether it’s about the steam engine, textile loom, light bulb, telephone, airplane, Model T, or, more recently, Macintosh, Google search engine, or Tesla electric car, has at its core a vision. It is the unalterable fate of technology visions that they run full life cycles from conception to obsolescence. Tech visions typically start with one person with an idea. Early on that visionary faces skepticism and rejection. But if the visionary has sufficient technical proficiency and the support of colleagues, he or she may hang on long enough to get a prototype working, an accomplishment that attracts others, who soon come to share in the vision, and thus a technology project snowballs, attracting more bright people, more funding, and, hopefully, widespread adoption. In time the vision gets stale, and the visionary grows stubborn, as others dream up new visions that challenge then replace the old. It’s how we got Facebook, the answer to MySpace, which was the answer to Friendster. It’s how we got Google, which was the answer to AltaVista, Lycos, and Info-seek. It’s how we got the iPhone after the Palm Treo, Apple Newton, and flip phones.
PLATO’s story is no different. But what a story.
Product details
- Publisher : Pantheon; First Edition (November 14, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 640 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1101871555
- ISBN-13 : 978-1101871553
- Item Weight : 2.12 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.6 x 1.5 x 9.8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #168,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #50 in Computing Industry History
- #74 in History of Engineering & Technology
- #137 in History of Technology
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Brian Dear worked on his first book over the course of 32 years, in-between technology startup companies. The result was released by Pantheon in 2017: "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture." It's a computer history that Silicon Valley would prefer you not know. So therefore you should definitely check it out.
When not doing startup companies or mentoring startup founders, Dear is probably working on music. A project for 2018 involves recording dozens of cover versions of songs in unusual arrangements and worldwide genres and styles.
Dear is an avid reader, consuming a few dozen nonfiction books per year, and occasional novels. He's nearing the end of the 4700-page History of the Second World War by Winston Churchill. He's a huge fan of Robert Caro and has read all of his books and recommends them highly.
Dear lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book's history compelling and well-researched. They describe it as engaging and a joy to read. Many find it valuable and worth the wait. The writing quality is praised as well-written and comprehensive. Readers appreciate the wonderful portrayals of interesting characters and their personalities. They also mention that the book covers computer-based communication and citizen participation. Opinions differ on the educational content, with some finding it useful for project managers, IT geeks, educational psychologists, and academic administrators, while others say it preserves important technology and the people involved in it.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers appreciate the book's history of educational computing. They find it well-researched, with compelling narratives and great vignettes. The book provides explanations of technology, debates among academic specialists, and descriptions.
"...It also highlights stories, as Brian Dear suggests, three books worth of stories, with heart and emotion, the highs and pitfalls of online culture...." Read more
"...The PLATO story is doubly amazing: first for what the community created in terms of online culture, and second for the extent to which the story has..." Read more
"...It's an eye opener and you will find yourself rooting for the good guys most of the time. And you will figure out who the Good Guys are." Read more
"I loved the history, the nerdy details, and the characters in "The Friendly Orange Glow"...." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and enjoyable to read. They describe it as a great recap of PLATO's history and addictive computing. The book conveys the excitement around interactive computing well.
"...Mr. Dear does an excellent job of conveying the addictive nature of interactive computing, and describes the many different ways that men..." Read more
"...A good book is one you can't put down. A great book is one that raises more questions beyond the books subject. This is one of the great ones...." Read more
"...He successfully conveys the excitement around PLATO, the addictive qualities, the hardware and software innovations, and so on...." Read more
"...This book is a joy to read for anyone involved with PLATO and should be an eye-opener for those who weren't." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and worth reading. They say it's a must-read for nostalgia fans and an important read.
"...This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the foundation of our modern connected world." Read more
"...Well, I saw it at Barnes and Noble and the wait was worth it...." Read more
"This book is a treasure. The PLATO system is sadly little known today, but its impact on the overall computer industry is significant...." Read more
"...Yes, it is long (I listened to it on Audible), but very engaging...." Read more
Customers find the book well-written and comprehensive. They appreciate the detailed explanations and multiple perspectives. The book also shows the people behind computers.
"...It reminds me of the quality writing of Tracy Kidder in “The Soul of the Machine” (1981)...." Read more
"...Brian has written an eminently readable book, no small task when you are tackling a subject as complex and diverse as the genesis of the PLATO system..." Read more
""The friendly Orange Glow" by Brian Dear is an extremely well-written book telling the story of one of the first true cyber cultures that..." Read more
"...Brian tells them well and from multiple perspectives. I was surprised at the long-standing secrets that were revealed...." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's character development. They appreciate the well-portrayed characters and the detailed descriptions of their personalities, politics, and culture. The author has a great storytelling voice that keeps readers gripped by the individual characters.
"...Dear documents the “Dawn of Cyberculture” with deep, readable details of the personalities, the politics, the culture, and stories of the..." Read more
"...the addictive nature of interactive computing, and describes the many different ways that men (and a few women) experienced the many novel aspects..." Read more
"...The author has a great storytelling voice so you get gripped by the individual stories of those involved with PLATO: a quadriplegic who created one..." Read more
"...the platform has a fascinating new set of features and an interesting set of characters doing stuff with those tools...." Read more
Customers are impressed by the book's communication capabilities. They mention research on computer-based communication and citizen participation. The book covers interactive chat, screen sharing, and instant communication available on Plato networked computers in 1973 and 1974.
"...In 1973 and 1974 alone, interactive chat, screen sharing, person notes (email), notesfiles (topic discussion groups), multi-player networked games,..." Read more
"...All those wonderful and new abilities to communicate that the internet has given us? They pretty much all have an antecedent at PLATO...." Read more
"...But there was also some research on computer-based communication and citizen participation...." Read more
"...and stories of the creative culture inspired by the instant communication available on the Plato networked computers...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the educational content. Some find it useful for project managers, IT geeks, and academic administrators, with lessons on important technology and people involved in it. Others feel that the social media features are distracting and there is little Plato-related content. The tone is sensationalistic, with scattered facts and details that need a better overview.
"...discussion, and pre-social media features, and precious little on the Plato educational content...." Read more
"...There are lessons here for project managers, IT geeks, educational psychologists, academic administrators, and many others, all told in great..." Read more
"...panels that emitted the "friendly orange glow", but it devote far too little to that aspect. I'll be donating the book to our local library." Read more
"A wonderful account of important technology and the people involved in it, preserved for those of us who were only dimly aware of the big things in..." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2017“The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear documents the “Dawn of Cyberculture” with deep, readable details of the personalities, the politics, the culture, and stories of the development of the PLATO system. It reminds me of the quality writing of Tracy Kidder in “The Soul of the Machine” (1981). “The Friendly Orange Glow” strongly deserves the five stars Amazon allows. (Though six would be more accurate.)
What is PLATO, you ask? The stuffy description would be that it was started in 1960 as a computer-based education system, a way to improve the learning (training?) of the United States to help keep ahead of the Soviet Union. It starts in the 1950s, touching on the impetus and mindset caused by the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The Cold War.
But, the PLATO system evolved to become much more than that. PLATO IV expanded the horizons of being an on-campus system in the 1960s to a far-reaching networked system in the early 1970s. In 1973 and 1974 alone, interactive chat, screen sharing, person notes (email), notesfiles (topic discussion groups), multi-player networked games, animated text graphics (animated emojis), graphic logon pages (Goodle search page), and more all provided a social dimension much broader than just being used for training.
“The Friendly Orange Glow” (TFOG) details the culture in which this environment thrived; the culture led by Don Bitzer and supported by the creative team at the University of Illinois. This development approach helped support the development of these many capabilities.
It also highlights stories, as Brian Dear suggests, three books worth of stories, with heart and emotion, the highs and pitfalls of online culture. How careers were made; how careers were lost by the addictive nature that PLATO affected some, many flunking from college or getting divorced because of the interactive networked games or discussion groups.
In late 1975, an interactive story, Guanogap, was released in installments. It was written as if you were watching over the shoulder of the narrator while he interacts with various characters, reads notes and pnotes (email). You see it happen. It is a snapshot of the culture, of the life on the PLATO system in 1975. I looked forward to every installment. I have yet to see an implementation of an interactive story anywhere on the Internet.
Wait, you say, weren’t interactive network games first started on the Internet in the 1990s? (Or, if you knew of the Xwindows systems of the 1980s, weren’t they developed there?)
Wasn’t networked computer-based training (CBT) first done using MOOCs in the 2000s? No. The first time-sharing use of a computer was developed for PLATO in the early 1960s.
John Brunner published my favorite read, “The Shockwave Rider” in 1975. I re-read it every few years and remain astounded at how forward looking it was, describing a twenty-first century world dominated by computer networks, hackers, cyber crime, and more. I don’t know whether Brunner ever saw or knew about the PLATO system, but the book also describes aspects of what PLATO was at the time in the early 1970s and what it could have become. The Internet has become that network. It first existed on the PLATO network.
You can still SEE and TOUCH the PLATO system live on the Internet. You can still use Notes, talkomatic, term-talk, and play the multitude of interactive games. Every Sunday evening, there is a pickup game in Empire. You might even see me there, though I tend to get killed a lot.
Guanogap is also there for you to read and experience.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2017If you have any interest in the history of the computer age, this book is a must-read.
The PLATO story is doubly amazing: first for what the community created in terms of online culture, and second for the extent to which the story has been almost completely forgotten by history. The author makes an analogy with another field: there is the "saltwater" school of legal theory, on both coasts, and the "freshwater" school, in the interior (e.g. Chicago). In almost every history ever written about the rise of computer and online culture, only the saltwater (Silicon Valley and Cambridge) perspective is represented, never that of the flyover regions, in particular Urbana-Champaign, IL.
I have been involved with computers since the time when PLATO was being developed, in the 1960s, and while I knew of the existence of PLATO I had no idea of the extent of the phenomenon or the lists of "firsts" it racked up.
Here's my theory after reading The Friendly Orange Glow: once you put a sufficient number and density of people online to communicate with flexible, growable tools, something like what we now know as the Internet culture will emerge. Certain features will develop: chat, email, threaded conversations both synchronous and asynchronous, and especially, multi-player games. Human experience in all its forms will come to be represented there: vocation, love, money, life and death.
PLATO was the first environment that offered all the requisites for the growth of an online culture -- and it all transpired 20 to 35 years before personal computers and the rise of the Internet.
Here are some things I didn't know before reading this book:
- The novelist Richard Powers, winner of the National Book Award and a MacArthur "genius"
grant, was immersed in the PLATO world when young, and the experience colored all of
his literary work since.
- Both DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) Notes and Lotus Notes came directly out of the earlier
PLATO Notes, and were produced by people who had been steeped in PLATO as college students.
- One of the most successful game authors in the history of computing, Brodie Lockard, was
almost completely paralyzed; and PLATO essentially saved his life, before bestowing on
him a rewarding and lucrative lifelong career.
The geeks among us will especially enjoy this book, but it has plenty of human interest stories and historical surprises that anyone can appreciate. Brian Dear is a masterful storyteller, and the birth, rise, Cambrian explosion of creativity, and slow death of the PLATO culture reads like a gripping novel. The amount of research behind Dear's accomplishment is nothing short of flabbergasting.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2022Brian did an excellent job at documenting a system it seems was one of the best kept secrets outside of the
PLATO community. As it evolved from Don Bitzer's initial creation in 1960 to it's demise in 2015, Brian Dear
brought all of the important moments from beginning to end to print. I knew a lot about it because I lived it during it's heydey in the 70s. The names and events were familiar but there was so much more that I never knew that wouldn't have to come to light had Brian not written this book. Between the reading the book itself and reading the acknowledgments at the end, you can see how hard the author worked over the 30 years to write it and get it right. I think Brian was as addicted to writing this as many of us were to using PLATO in the 70s. I can only repeat what so many have penned before me. PLATO
was something that was not well known then or now except to the 1000 to 13,000 users at it's peak.
While moderately commercially successful it was mis-understood and mis-managed as a a business.
Had it not happened, the internet would be much different from what it is today. The book is about those people who made PLATO the fore-runner of what we know the internet to be today. It's about how those people who went on to take those PLATO ideas and make them part of our culture now. Where did the idea of chat rooms, messaging, texting group forums and gaming with players around the world start......PLATO. Well I can't add anymore or put it any better than all those before me except, read it.
It's an eye opener and you will find yourself rooting for the good guys most of the time. And you will figure out who the Good Guys are.
Top reviews from other countries
Christian PekelerReviewed in Canada on October 23, 20184.0 out of 5 stars a bit too long
I guess everyone has different desires for details. For me, this otherwise excellent book could have been a couple 100 pages shorter.
W. HernReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 22, 20185.0 out of 5 stars An important contribution to the history of computing
This is a meticulous account of the PLATO computing systems that ran during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The author has worked on this book for a quarter of a century and this effort is clearly visible in the final prose. The result is a highly comprehensive retelling of the story of PLATO, the most important computer system that people have never heard of. Anyone interested in the history of computing and/or online culture should read this book. Highly recommended!
One person found this helpfulReport-
Marc VauclairReviewed in France on April 4, 20185.0 out of 5 stars Un très agréable surprise et un fameux bol de souvenirs
J'ai eu l'extrême privilège de faire partie de ces pioniers qui ont pu faire leurs armes sur Plato (auteur de 1979 à 1983 pendant mes études universitaires). Ce livre est génial et fait remonter de très nombreux souvenirs à la surface.
Le style naratif est aussi très agréable.
Je recommande très certainement ce livre à ceux qui ont fait partie de cette merveilleuse aventure et aussi à ceux qui désirent voir l'histoire de l'informatique moderne par un autre bout de la lorgnette.
Ashton W.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 2, 20185.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Delightful dialogue, annecdotes and archival images/diagrams make this book a fascinating read for anyone. Fantastically interesting subject too, it's an untold story that tells a lot - our economy would look miles different without PLATO. Heartily recommended to any internet history or technology enthusiast's.

