Plato terminal

From: Lawrence LeMay <lemay_at_cs.umn.edu>
Date: Wed Jul 11 20:11:09 2001

Um, 2 years, right.

You're correct, I do have a CDC Plato ISP/MET terminal. Someone wrote 3-72
on one of the stickers inside the terminal, but several boards I checked
appeared to have IC's from 78 or 79. The boards could well have
been updated, since I received the terminal from a CDC employee in
the early 80's.

Does anyone have any manuals for this terminal?

Just for the heck of it, I just snapped a couple digital pictures as the
terminal sits in my closet:

   http://www-users.itlabs.umn.edu/~lemay/computers/plato

-Lawrence LeMay

> This is two years late, but the terminal the original poster describes
> sounds like an IST (model 1), a CRT-based CDC product, vintage about 1978.
> There was a later edition called the IST-II, also CDC. It had two 8" drives
> and a Z-80 CPU, as well as connectivity to CDC PLATO mainframe systems,
> either by dialup modem (1200 bps) or multiplexer.
>
> The IST is not the oldest PLATO terminal, but it is the oldest that CDC
> manufactured, I suspect. Even my PLATO IV (Magnavox, 1971) is not the
> oldest, but only the first mass-produced machine. The earliest ones date to
> about 1961 and there are probably only two or three still in existence, if
> we're lucky enough to have that many. A precursor to these would be Norman
> Crowder's Auto-Tutor, vintage about 1958, which has characteristics very
> similar to the PLATO terminals (though it is not a computer terminal, it
> operates on filmstrip media), and PLATO's mechanisms are said to have been
> influenced by this machine.
>
> Peter Zelchenko (pete_at_suba.com)
> Chicago, Illinois
>
>
>
Received on Wed Jul 11 2001 - 20:11:09 BST

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