PLATO: An educational computer system from the 60s shaped the future
This again. Ted Gioia also mentioned it this week. They did have some nice technology.<p>I was there then. My total interaction with PLATO was once, as an experimental subject for a Psych class. A friend of mine had <i>one</i> class that used it. The consensus of the internet-history mailing list is that they were not very influential.<p>They didn't "shape the future" because they kept to themselves, in their own building. We never saw them in the Digital Computer Lab. CDC completely missed the distributed computing revolution.