Performing History on PLATO: A Response to a Recent SIGCIS Presentation

From OP:

Rankin’s presentation makes assertions about the PLATO system, its developers, its users, and its online and offline culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the 1960s and 1970s, that paint a decidedly negative picture, one where Rankin declares PLATO suffered from “endemic misogyny” and that she likens to a “fortress of patriarchal heterosexual power in American computing.” Such a description stands in stark contrast to the picture described to me by roughly a thousand PLATO people over the course of more than thirty years of research. (The result of this research is my upcoming book The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture to be released by Pantheon Books in November 2017.)

Rankin’s conclusions appear to be based on misunderstandings, historical errors, omissions, and confirmation bias, resulting in a general thesis that PLATO was a horrible woman-hating environment. A response and correction is urgently needed, in light of the fact that this presentation was given under the auspices of SIGCIS, a group devoted to a scholarly, nuanced, and accurate recounting of the history of computing, the fact that the conference was co-produced by and held at the prestigious Computer History Museum, and the fact that Rankin says that her talk comes from an upcoming book, A People’s History of Computing, to be published by Harvard University Press. At least as far as PLATO goes, I feel it my duty to address each of Rankin’s points and clarify the history to the best of my ability based not only on extensive past research but also present-day comments from actual PLATO people who have viewed Rankin’s video, including a number of people whom I contacted for this article and who are identified by name in her talk and who were physically present at the PLATO lab decades ago.