Irata.online: A PLATO service for retro computing enthusiasts | Hacker News Reader

Irata.online: A PLATO service for retro computing enthusiasts

irata.online

70 pointsairstrike26 comments

I was not expecting to read about PLATO on HN today.

I was at Illinois for 5 1/2 years, just down Springfield Ave. from the PLATO lab, and yet I never went there except for an experiment in Psych 100. Even working in the Digital Computer Lab, we almost never saw those people. We knew they were doing interesting stuff, but they mostly kept to themselves. My friends had either one class with PLATO (a Latin class) or no classes.

There was some discussion in the Internet history mailing list about the supposedly vital contribution that PLATO made to ARPANET. It isn't really true, sorry. PLATO was influential in a lot of areas, but not that one.

>There was some discussion in the Internet history mailing list about the supposedly vital contribution that PLATO made to ARPANET.

Good grief. The Friendly Orange Glow certainly doesn't claim that, so to hear that people would claim otherwise is mystifying. It's that relative lack of contribution to what would become the Internet that caused PLATO's relative obscurity today in computing history compared to Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT's contributions (and, probably, the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude that I imagine drove the discussion you cite).

internet-history@ is an old-fashioned mailing list, so you can probably read the archives if you want. As I recall, there was someone there who really resisted the consensus that PLATO didn't contribute much.

with respect, it contributed immensely. USENET traced a lineage to PLATO notesfiles. That was the http equivalent until http came along.

How many entries in the RFC index have PLATO developers as authors? It sounds like there should be a few, at least.

>USENET traced a lineage to PLATO notesfiles.

I am aware of no such connection. Usenet is a product of Duke and UNC, not UIUC. More to the point, its specifications are very similar to that of the near-contemporaneous SMTP. AlbertCory mentions RFCs; both Usenet and SMTP are fully described in various RFCs. PLATO is not.

PLATO did inspire Lotus Notes; Ray Ozzie attended UIUC.

Yeah, like you I'm just challenging the claim that they contributed to the Internet. OP claimed some credit for USENET, and I said "OK, then what RFCs did they contribute to?"

I never really thought about PLATO being described in an RFC. But "the internet" is: TCP, SMTP, DNS, SNMP, Telnet, FTP, BGP, etc. etc.

"Intellectual influence" ? Sure, ok, but usually that would show up as citations in other publications.

Does the original PLATO educational content still exist? That might be useful. They had good online math classes, supposedly. It's not about emulating the terminal.

Man, this is a blast from the past. PLATO was primarily before I should have any experience but I was a student at a K12 school district that still used it’s early/mid-aughts incarnation. Some lessons from which would, very rarely, be presented in an emulator. A few lessons just never got rewritten with their later runtime.

"Now landing on the planet Irata." -- M.U.L.E.

Classic. I still play it today with my friends on a C64 that keeps going after 35 years or so.

Any recipes for self-hosting something like this?

This seems to cover it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181123085448/http://www.contro...

Thank you!

the Romulan ship near that dead planet made me want to hyper in and dump torps.

I immediately searched for "Empire" on that page, and was disappointed until I saw that image. That was always my favorite part of PLATO.

I know the one and only irata/TRSI... Is that him?

This is a cool project, but I should feel the need to warn anyone who gets too involved: the main person (T. Cherryhomes) behind this has a weird proclivity to tell people to kill themselves. He's done it to me, my friends, and random other strangers. It's disappointing seeing such a cool projected backed by someone so hostile :(

Use https://cyber1.org/index.asp instead and avoid a bad actor.

Libelous statements like this are not cool. If you have an issue with me, let's hash it out.

My issue with you is that you post abusively at people in retro computing groups. You have told me to kill myself and I have seen you tell people to f** themselves with a chainsaw. You have the good sense to delete it afterwards, but the damage is done.

There is nothing to hash out - I simply seek to warn people to be wary before engaging with you.

At least you seem to have stopped spamming the various retro groups. So, that's improvement.

What does that accomplish, for you? You seem to be wanting to damage my reputation because you don't like that I am constantly posting news.

You're attributing motivations to my actions that don't exist. This exchange wouldn't be happening if you'd only just "constantly posted news".

There is a reason you're in various retro computing facebook group killfiles; anyways, this isn't productive to post further about, so I won't.

Killfiles? Really. First I've heard of it.

You're really going out of your way to crap on me. I want to know why?

-Thom

> You're really going out of your way to crap on me. I want to know why?

Your behavior here only reinforces my point. I don't feel that getting into a flame war on HN is productive or good. It apparently needs repeating (and this will be my last post on this subject or in response to you).

My issue with you is that you post abusively at people in retro computing groups. You have told me to kill myself and I have seen you tell people to f* themselves with a chainsaw. You have the good sense to delete it afterwards, but the damage is done.

There is nothing to hash out - I simply seek to warn people to be wary before engaging with you.

As such a claim is particularly serious, you are obliged to provide proof.

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