The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture

This book spends an inordinate amount of words on detailed gaming discussion, and pre-social media features, and precious little on the Plato educational content. At the end there is some content, but too little and too late.It is amazing to me that being in the College of Education at U of I 1997-1999 I never heard of Plato there. Of course our text book in those days was from the 1940’s written by a current professor at the time who apparently still needed the royalties.I do recall hearing about Plato in the late 80’s, perhaps on CompuServe, but only as an expensive ($10k) and unapproachable system for regular citizens to access. Not all of use lived in a wealthy area or near a university. Education is still largely based on zip code in this country. My HS didn’t have a modern music program, an automotive program, or a baseball team with were my primary interests then. I did learn to set type by hand for a 1950’s vintage printing press however.After graduating and teaching full-time HS, I was then teaching part time at the post secondary level and subbing at the elementary secondary levels. In my spare time I was playing with Asymetrix Tool book, a Windows based e-learning content authoring program released by Asymetrix Corporation in 1990.In these current days we hear on the news that Post Pandemic our school proficiency scores have dropped from Pre Pandemic ranges of 40-30 percentiles down to 30—20 percentiles and no one is asking why they are not in the 80 percentile range. People just accept this, most them knowing full well that education is one of the prime determinations of your trajectory in life. People are accepting of a national reading proficiently rate of about 40 percent, HS completion of about 90 percent (dubious) and a college educated rate of about 40 percent, also dubious.Twenty years ago I read that we select our teachers from the bottom third of HS SAT scores, (Sowell) and graduate them from our colleges of education in the upper third of college grades. I have seen the public education system from teacher, school board member, and digital divide NGO perspectives. I have seen the online for profit graduate programs, (U of Phoenix, Capella) as a student who eventually dropped out half way through a MS because of how bad it was.I also spent a good part of my career in corporate training, where I perfected the art and science of teaching/instructing. I learned more from Microsoft and Intel training programs about how to teach technical subjects as a student than I ever did in college. So I can relate to his experience of learning more from a carburetor training program on how to teach and how students learn, then from anywhere else.I remember approving millions in expensive over priced and underwhelming Mac computers and hundreds of thousands on curriculum software only to have the teachers bitch about not having Internet connections. This was early 2000’s and there was little if any educational content on the web then.We have more computer CPU power, inexpensive massive disk space, huge displays, and graphics GPU power than ever before. We have some outstanding curricula software but need a lot more. We have some outstanding online resources. Why can’t we improve teaching and learning?In 2022 we seem to have come full circle now with schools spending millions for fancy portable dumb terminals, aka Chromebooks, and meanwhile the test scores in my area in particular continue to decline.

Excellent in depth history of the early days of educational computing. Highly recommended.

“The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear documents the “Dawn of Cyberculture” with deep, readable details of the personalities, the politics, the culture, and stories of the development of the PLATO system. It reminds me of the quality writing of Tracy Kidder in “The Soul of the Machine” (1981). “The Friendly Orange Glow” strongly deserves the five stars Amazon allows. (Though six would be more accurate.)What is PLATO, you ask? The stuffy description would be that it was started in 1960 as a computer-based education system, a way to improve the learning (training?) of the United States to help keep ahead of the Soviet Union. It starts in the 1950s, touching on the impetus and mindset caused by the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The Cold War.But, the PLATO system evolved to become much more than that. PLATO IV expanded the horizons of being an on-campus system in the 1960s to a far-reaching networked system in the early 1970s. In 1973 and 1974 alone, interactive chat, screen sharing, person notes (email), notesfiles (topic discussion groups), multi-player networked games, animated text graphics (animated emojis), graphic logon pages (Goodle search page), and more all provided a social dimension much broader than just being used for training.“The Friendly Orange Glow” (TFOG) details the culture in which this environment thrived; the culture led by Don Bitzer and supported by the creative team at the University of Illinois. This development approach helped support the development of these many capabilities.It also highlights stories, as Brian Dear suggests, three books worth of stories, with heart and emotion, the highs and pitfalls of online culture. How careers were made; how careers were lost by the addictive nature that PLATO affected some, many flunking from college or getting divorced because of the interactive networked games or discussion groups.In late 1975, an interactive story, Guanogap, was released in installments. It was written as if you were watching over the shoulder of the narrator while he interacts with various characters, reads notes and pnotes (email). You see it happen. It is a snapshot of the culture, of the life on the PLATO system in 1975. I looked forward to every installment. I have yet to see an implementation of an interactive story anywhere on the Internet.Wait, you say, weren’t interactive network games first started on the Internet in the 1990s? (Or, if you knew of the Xwindows systems of the 1980s, weren’t they developed there?)Wasn’t networked computer-based training (CBT) first done using MOOCs in the 2000s? No. The first time-sharing use of a computer was developed for PLATO in the early 1960s.John Brunner published my favorite read, “The Shockwave Rider” in 1975. I re-read it every few years and remain astounded at how forward looking it was, describing a twenty-first century world dominated by computer networks, hackers, cyber crime, and more. I don’t know whether Brunner ever saw or knew about the PLATO system, but the book also describes aspects of what PLATO was at the time in the early 1970s and what it could have become. The Internet has become that network. It first existed on the PLATO network.You can still SEE and TOUCH the PLATO system live on the Internet. You can still use Notes, talkomatic, term-talk, and play the multitude of interactive games. Every Sunday evening, there is a pickup game in Empire. You might even see me there, though I tend to get killed a lot.Guanogap is also there for you to read and experience.

Brian did an excellent job at documenting a system it seems was one of the best kept secrets outside of thePLATO community. As it evolved from Don Bitzer's initial creation in 1960 to it's demise in 2015, Brian Dearbrought all of the important moments from beginning to end to print. I knew a lot about it because I lived it during it's heydey in the 70s. The names and events were familiar but there was so much more that I never knew that wouldn't have to come to light had Brian not written this book. Between the reading the book itself and reading the acknowledgments at the end, you can see how hard the author worked over the 30 years to write it and get it right. I think Brian was as addicted to writing this as many of us were to using PLATO in the 70s. I can only repeat what so many have penned before me. PLATOwas something that was not well known then or now except to the 1000 to 13,000 users at it's peak.While moderately commercially successful it was mis-understood and mis-managed as a a business.Had it not happened, the internet would be much different from what it is today. The book is about those people who made PLATO the fore-runner of what we know the internet to be today. It's about how those people who went on to take those PLATO ideas and make them part of our culture now. Where did the idea of chat rooms, messaging, texting group forums and gaming with players around the world start......PLATO. Well I can't add anymore or put it any better than all those before me except, read it.It's an eye opener and you will find yourself rooting for the good guys most of the time. And you will figure out who the Good Guys are.

I guess everyone has different desires for details. For me, this otherwise excellent book could have been a couple 100 pages shorter.

This is a meticulous account of the PLATO computing systems that ran during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The author has worked on this book for a quarter of a century and this effort is clearly visible in the final prose. The result is a highly comprehensive retelling of the story of PLATO, the most important computer system that people have never heard of. Anyone interested in the history of computing and/or online culture should read this book. Highly recommended!

J'ai eu l'extrême privilège de faire partie de ces pioniers qui ont pu faire leurs armes sur Plato (auteur de 1979 à 1983 pendant mes études universitaires). Ce livre est génial et fait remonter de très nombreux souvenirs à la surface.Le style naratif est aussi très agréable.Je recommande très certainement ce livre à ceux qui ont fait partie de cette merveilleuse aventure et aussi à ceux qui désirent voir l'histoire de l'informatique moderne par un autre bout de la lorgnette.

Delightful dialogue, annecdotes and archival images/diagrams make this book a fascinating read for anyone. Fantastically interesting subject too, it's an untold story that tells a lot - our economy would look miles different without PLATO. Heartily recommended to any internet history or technology enthusiast's.