Patrick Logan: “PLATO is one of the seven (or so) wonders of the software world.” In 1988 I was a physics major at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, and I was doing exercises and homework on touch-sensitive PLATO graphics terminals. I knew it was a cool system, but I didn't know just how cool.
(not me)
Too bad I can't get any audio on this lecture, “Lessons Learned: Interacting with the PLATO System”, by Brian Dear (founding director of eBay Design Labs--check out his weblog).
There may be some analogy here with lisp machines. I'll leave that to you to consider.
Posted by jjwiseman at July 17, 2003 09:14 AMLooks like you need the Voxware Metasound codec. Assuming you're on windows, clicking on the _lower quality_ link seems to prompt you to install it, while clicking on the higher one just silently fails. Maybe it's subtly making a point about modern user interfaces?
Posted by: Daniel Merritt on July 17, 2003 04:52 PMI played with plato back at my undergrad days. It actually was pretty darn cool. AFAIR one of the neat-yet-difficult things about them were those big-honking plasma screens.
They could do quite a bit more graphics, though, than the the standard "PC XT", let alone the dumb terminal. This was before Xwindows and Id software, mind you.
I stumbled across this 'creative eccentrics' link.
Posted by: billmil on July 25, 2003 05:53 PMI played with plato back at my undergrad days. It actually was pretty darn cool. AFAIR one of the neat-yet-difficult things about them were those big-honking plasma screens.
They could do quite a bit more graphics, though, than the the standard "PC XT", let alone the dumb terminal. This was before Xwindows and Id software, mind you.
I stumbled across this 'creative eccentrics' link.
Posted by: billmil on July 25, 2003 05:53 PM