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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

by Brian Dear (Author)

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At a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t even born, a group of visionary engineers and designers—some of them only high school students—in the late 1960s and 1970s created a computer system called PLATO, which was light-years ahead in experimenting with how people would learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected computers. Not only did PLATO engineers make significant hardware breakthroughs with plasma displays and touch screens but PLATO programmers also came up with a long list of software innovations: chat rooms, instant messaging, message boards, screen savers, multiplayer games, online newspapers, interactive fiction, and emoticons. Together, the PLATO community pioneered what we now collectively engage in as cyberculture. They were among the first to identify and also realize the potential and scope of the social interconnectivity of computers, well before the creation of the internet. PLATO was the foundational model for every online community that was to follow in its footsteps.

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 length

640 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

November 14, 2017
Dimensions

6.6 x 1.5 x 9.8 inches
ISBN-10

1101871555
ISBN-13

978-1101871553
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Mr. Dear guesses that he spent about 11 years of solid work on his book over more than 30 years. His diligence shows. Thanks to his meticulous research and conversational writing style, The Friendly Orange Glow is an enjoyable and authoritative treatment of an important piece of our social and technological heritage.”
—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

BRIAN DEAR is a longtime tech-startup entrepreneur and the founder of companies including Coconut Computing, FlatWorks, Eventful, and Nettle. He has also worked at a variety of dot-com companies, including MP3 and eBay, and he worked in computer-based education for eight years, including five on the PLATO system. He has written for Educational Technology, BYTE, IEEE Expert, and San Diego Reader. Dear lives with his wife in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PREFACE

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 ‏ : ‎ 2.13 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.6 x 1.5 x 9.8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #305,605 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #70 in Computing Industry History
- #143 in History of Engineering & Technology
- #294 in History of Technology

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Brian Dear

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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.

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Michael F. Pitsch

Interesting but leaves you wanting more

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 30, 2022

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This book spends an inordinate amount of words on detailed gaming discussion, and pre-social media features, and precious little on the Plato educational content. At the end there is some content, but too little and too late.

It is amazing to me that being in the College of Education at U of I 1997-1999 I never heard of Plato there. Of course our text book in those days was from the 1940’s written by a current professor at the time who apparently still needed the royalties.
I do recall hearing about Plato in the late 80’s, perhaps on CompuServe, but only as an expensive ($10k) and unapproachable system for regular citizens to access. Not all of use lived in a wealthy area or near a university. Education is still largely based on zip code in this country. My HS didn’t have a modern music program, an automotive program, or a baseball team with were my primary interests then. I did learn to set type by hand for a 1950’s vintage printing press however.
After graduating and teaching full-time HS, I was then teaching part time at the post secondary level and subbing at the elementary secondary levels. In my spare time I was playing with Asymetrix Tool book, a Windows based e-learning content authoring program released by Asymetrix Corporation in 1990.

In these current days we hear on the news that Post Pandemic our school proficiency scores have dropped from Pre Pandemic ranges of 40-30 percentiles down to 30—20 percentiles and no one is asking why they are not in the 80 percentile range. People just accept this, most them knowing full well that education is one of the prime determinations of your trajectory in life. People are accepting of a national reading proficiently rate of about 40 percent, HS completion of about 90 percent (dubious) and a college educated rate of about 40 percent, also dubious.

Twenty years ago I read that we select our teachers from the bottom third of HS SAT scores, (Sowell) and graduate them from our colleges of education in the upper third of college grades. I have seen the public education system from teacher, school board member, and digital divide NGO perspectives. I have seen the online for profit graduate programs, (U of Phoenix, Capella) as a student who eventually dropped out half way through a MS because of how bad it was.

I also spent a good part of my career in corporate training, where I perfected the art and science of teaching/instructing. I learned more from Microsoft and Intel training programs about how to teach technical subjects as a student than I ever did in college. So I can relate to his experience of learning more from a carburetor training program on how to teach and how students learn, then from anywhere else.
I remember approving millions in expensive over priced and underwhelming Mac computers and hundreds of thousands on curriculum software only to have the teachers bitch about not having Internet connections. This was early 2000’s and there was little if any educational content on the web then.

We have more computer CPU power, inexpensive massive disk space, huge displays, and graphics GPU power than ever before. We have some outstanding curricula software but need a lot more. We have some outstanding online resources. Why can’t we improve teaching and learning?

In 2022 we seem to have come full circle now with schools spending millions for fancy portable dumb terminals, aka Chromebooks, and meanwhile the test scores in my area in particular continue to decline.

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Charles Welsh

A stunning tour de force that captures the magic and impact of PLATO

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 17, 2022

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I've lived in Silicon Valley for more than a quarter century, a lifetime away from the PLATO terminal I stumbled into in 1978 as a college junior. Almost no one here seems to know what PLATO was and how presaged and influenced the technology they are working with today. Referring people to Brian Dear's masterwork should well make it easier to explain and perhaps make them look at me less strangely when I wax nostalgic about PLATO.

Reading this history, I found myself swept back in time, basking in names and events I'd heard of and learning a great deal, too.

For me, as for many others PLATO changed the direction of my life. How this could happen is nigh impossible to explain to those who have not experienced PLATO. At the time, there was no way to understand it other than to use it. And now, it is so antiquated that people wonder "huh, how could that have made a difference?"

But what an impact PLATO made - and Brian expertly captures the broad strokes and fine details. He includes many of the consequent developments, spin offs and impacts of PLATO (many of us trying in our future work to recapture some of that PLATO magic.) Nothing I've ever used or been a part of, has remotely approached the magic of the PLATO community in terms of helpfulness, innovation, and a sense of belonging. The Friendly Orange Glow captures all of this. It warms my heart at this point in my career to have had my own place in that community that started so much, that so few experienced, and whose innovations went on to to be enjoyed by so many.

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William F Boyer

Without PLATO, the Internet would be quite different from today

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 28, 2022

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Brian 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.

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W. Hern

An important contribution to the history of computing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 22, 2018

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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!

Ashton W.

Great book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 2, 2018

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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.

Christian Pekeler

a bit too long

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 23, 2018

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I guess everyone has different desires for details. For me, this otherwise excellent book could have been a couple 100 pages shorter.

Marc Vauclair

Un très agréable surprise et un fameux bol de souvenirs

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on April 4, 2018

Verified Purchase

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.

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