> Douglas,
>
> It should be CDC, several guys from CDC left and came to Atari at one
> point to work in the Home Computer Division (1982-1984) and among their
> projects were computers with built in modems for communications and also the
> Plato Terminal Cartridge for the Atari 8bit computer systems. When the
> service was running I used to logon, it was amazing to see the color
> graphics and animation, all well before the advent of Mosiac and "the web"
While CDC provided the mainframe hardware support, Donald Bitzer at the
University of Illinois created PLATO. Around 1981, UofI and CDC parted
ways, with both retaining ownership of PLATO.
But every piece of CDC equipment I've ever said had the distinctive
style of CDC equipment design, and the PLATO plasma display terminal
didn't have the CDC look. Seems I vaguely recall being told 25 years
ago that they were indeed made by Magnavox.
PLATO still lives, you know, at least the UofI version does, as
NovaNET. I've been granted access to NovaNET as a "distinguished
visiting scholar".
I've put a gallery of PLATO scren shots at:
http://members.iglou.com/dougq/cdc/post-login.jpg
http://members.iglou.com/dougq/cdc/llist-index.jpg
http://members.iglou.com/dougq/cdc/recreation.jpg
http://members.iglou.com/dougq/cdc/choose.jpg
and then a more complete gallery at:
http://members.iglou.com/dougq/plato_index.html
that brings you to a page that has thumbnails of the entire
gallery. If you're on a slow link, you may want to jump
straight to the first frame:
http://members.iglou.com/dougq/plato/html/PlatoIV-00.html
then you can "press" "Next" each frame to advance to the next.
This way, it plays back a little bit like it looked on screen,
except the tiny amount of animation the lesson provides can't
be seen on these pages.
I have a second gallery, showing the multi-user game EMPIRE,
but right now I'm shy of space to upload it.
Regards,
-doug quebbeman
Received on Tue Jul 10 2001 - 06:27:52 BST
