Call for Resources for CDC 6000/Cyber 70 Series Emulator

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Fri Jun 1 06:57:57 2001

> > Hmmm.. Don't remember that, but I do remember Empire,
> > and some other Star Trek game... as well as the coolest
> > LISP and Pascal interpreter environments I ever used.
>
> Please elaborate!
>
> -- Derek (hoping for watchpoints or formatted display of
> the source code -- i.e., with italics or proportional spacing)

It *did* auto-format the code... but as these were the earliest
examples of what I think was incremental compiler technology,
you'd be typing the source text, and when you committed a syntax
error, the offending element was highlighted by a dashed-lined
circle, and further entry stopped until you corrected your
mistake.

I only got to spend a couple of months on PLATO. But a team
at Northwestern University liked PLATO enough but was bummed
about the cost of the special terminals that the developed a
CDC subsystem called MultiTutor, which ran the Tutor IV language
(and thus you could port PLATO programs to it), but worked not
only with the PLATO terminals, but with any kind of terminal
that offerred at least cursor control codes.

MultiTutor's coolest feature was the first example of what
we'd now call a chat room. Instead of a scrolling display
with lines of user-typed text prefixed by a username, you
got a display segmented into channels, each of which was
occupied by a user. What that user typed appeared in that
channel on the screen. It was thus limited in the number
of users it could support, but it was easier (IMHO) to
follow a multiperson conversation.

When I came to UN*Xen finally, I tried NTalk and YTalk
for a while, but IRC has just never worked for me...
I always want to go back to that MultiTutor chat room...

Regards,
-dq
Received on Fri Jun 01 2001 - 06:57:57 BST