The Friendly Orange Glow

The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture

By: Brian Dear

Narrated by: George Newbern

At a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t even born, a group of visionary engineers and designers—some of them only high school students—in the late 1960s and 1970s created a computer system called PLATO, which was light-years ahead in experimenting with how people would learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected computers. Not only did PLATO engineers make significant hardware breakthroughs with plasma displays and touch screens but PLATO programmers also came up with a long list of software innovations: chat rooms, instant messaging, message boards, screen savers, multiplayer games, online newspapers, interactive fiction, and emoticons. Together, the PLATO community pioneered what we now collectively engage in as cyberculture. They were among the first to identify and also realize the potential and scope of the social interconnectivity of computers, well before the creation of the internet. PLATO was the foundational model for every online community that was to follow in its footsteps.

The Friendly Orange Glow is the first history to recount in fascinating detail the remarkable accomplishments and inspiring personal stories of the PLATO community. The addictive nature of PLATO both ruined many a college career and launched pathbreaking multimillion-dollar software products. Its development, impact, and eventual disappearance provides an instructive case study of technological innovation and disruption, project management, and missed opportunities. Above all, The Friendly Orange Glow at last reveals new perspectives on the origins of social computing and our internet-infatuated world.

More than Friendly

The most powerful story, the ceation of Shanghai and the role of the Plato system in so many of today's computer scientists and software. I too was unaware of UofI and its contribution.

Memory lane for the cyberist.

Great job on giving the personal stories, history and culture of Plato, the foundation of our cyber world. I first touch a Plato terminal as a young USAF computer operations officer in 1976. I worked at DEC, daily using VAX Notes, NCS with NovaNet, Pearson and Plato Learning. Kudos to the author!!!!

One of best computer history books

Well-written and well-narrated, this book describes how people evolved together with evolution of accessible computers. Do not hesitate, you will not sorry if you buy this book

A very detailed computer assisted education history!

A marvelously well written account of a very early computer assisted education system. Incredibly detailed anecdotes keeps the story fresh and multiple successes and failures make it all still very relevant. A very unique book because of the depth of details from hundreds of individuals!

Wonderful book on the history of the PLATO system!

There were many systems that were ahead of their times. This was one of them. This one blew me away, as it was the beginning of all things we do today. A flat-screen 512x512 graphics display in the 1970's -- in a computer terminal? Wow! What was done with it was spectacular, being able to show color microfiche-based images behind that screen! Mind-boggling for the time! So many things came out of this - like computer-based training, games, authoring systems like Adobe Flash (Macromedia before Adobe acquired it) Computer training before video was cheap to do. One other thing that is close to my heart. The game "Shanghai II" that my wife still loves, was created by a handicapped guy on the PLATO system and then he later ported it to the Mac and distributed it through Activision. What a wonderful find, I just had no idea that her favorite game had such a history! There was so much happening in the computer industry while I was in grade school! Very lovely history with some painful points, some touching stories, and of course the sad demise of PLATO, CERL, and Control Data. Sweet book!