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Comment by bbulkow | Hacker News Reader

I used Plato at udel , and had my first programming jobs there. It is hard to underestimate how far ahead they were, and that system influenced all my designs in my entire career.

Like realtime chat with any other user, character by character updates (what, you have to press enter to send? primitive!)

Friday afternoon dogfights used a lot of resources, but were super cool. Tens and maybe 100 users all in the same real time flight space, duking it out...

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> what, you have to press enter to send? primitive!

Is that really good UX? I want to have a chance to fix my typos and other errors before sending.

I find it awkward as well, but Google Wave worked exactly like this, and people praised it for this feature.

Ahh the mountains of praise for Google Wave, I remember it well

It was ahead of its time.

I think ICQ used to work like this too, and I remember how impressed by it I was.

Back in the day, most hardware couldn’t send data without having the user press ‘send’.

A shared system that could survive being interrupted whenever any of its users pressed a key still was relatively rare.

So I guess this might ¿partly? Have been to show of the capabilities of the system. At 1200 or maybe even 300 baud, it may also be the better UX, but I wouldn’t know.

The most that you could have in the dogfights would have been around 30 (if =empire) or about 5? (if =dogfight), and the definition of 'real time' was 1 frame every few seconds, as one might expect when you are limited to 10 TIPS (thousand instructions per second).

Empire was built around a 10 second replot mechanic and you frequently used the STOP button to stop the screen from drawing so you could get interactivity back quickly.

Realtime chat was amazing, especially with the ability to move characters around/erase characters with the pixel addressable 512x512 plasma screens; people would draw art by using characters, then moving the cursor back over them, and then erasing, or drawing in another character. O shift-space * shift-space ? would be O, * and ? on top of each other, which kind of looked like a smiley face. Fun times.

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