Comment by MilStdJunkie

Ars did a really great overview of the system back in March.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/plato-how-an-educati...

It's incredible what they got out of those CDC machines. I wish I had the EE skills to figure out how they did it. I suspect that the vacuum tubes might have yielded some compute capabilities far beyond transistors of the era, given the very high power levels you can get in tubes. But I don't know. It might just be very open-ended approaches to memory registers, or simply letting the plasma display do its own thing rather than wipe it back to its initial state.