Comment by OhMeadhbh

A few PLATO stories:

The first time I saw a PLATO terminal was wandering through one of the engineering buildings at UIUC in '78. I was captured by the "friendly orange glow." There were some people there so I snuck in and started talking to them. I was able to convince them to give me an account on the down-low... don't tell anyone about it 'cause I don't want to get kicked off the system. So I would swing by there or the library on off-peak times so I wouldn't be accused of using the system for frivolous things like music while other people were doing SERIOUS work.

It turns out, part of their plan was to give a real account to anyone who wandered by. It was back when we really weren't sure what personal computing was going to look like and they were a university so they experimented with letting high school students, random musicians, liberal arts students, people from town... anyone who asked for an account pretty much got one.

One day I learned the new-ish terminals were run by an 8080 CPU and had some I/O off to the side (I think mostly to run a slide projector.) I mentioned this would be great way to control a network of synthesizers and one of the guys said "Oh! You should talk to Sherwin!" -- they were talking about Sherwin Gooch who made the "Gooch Synthetic Woodwind" that hooked up to the PLATO terminal and made wood-windy sounds. I went looking for him but all I found was a box of parts and a story about how he had left town to go to Florida State.

Several years later I'm at Florida State working for Paul Dirac (this was right before he passed away, so probably '85.) And hey! They have PLATO terminals at Florida State. I was musing about using them to control synthesizers again to people in Tallahassee and one of them says "Hey! You should talk to Sherwin! He made some musical instrument to hook up to the old terminals!" And I went looking for the mythical Sherwin only to discover a box of parts and a story that he had taken a job in Sili Valley.

After a decade of working for Bell Canada, I finally make it out to Sili Valley for a job tuning modular exponentiators for PowerPC devices. This was probably '98. And I go visit a few friends at CCRMA (Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.) I was peripherally involved with psycho-acoustic research at Bell Canada, so it's not a complete stretch for me to be there. I'm chatting with a friend I met in Tallahassee, who happened to be working in Palo Alto. I eventually mention PLATO and the Gooch Virtual Woodwind and my friend says "Oh yea! You should talk to Sherwin!" And I'm ready for him to say something like "but he moved to outer mongolia..." but instead he says "and he's sitting right over there."

So after 20 years I finally got to have my conversation with Sherwin about computer music and PLATO. Though honestly, we mostly talked about techniques for solving math problems.

---

Fast forward another 15 years and someone launched cyber1.org, which is an online emulated CDC6700(?) running the PLATO software. Just download the pterm package and you can talk to it. You could, apparently, use your old login id so people could find you on the system again. I couldn't remember by group authenticator so it took a few days to get logged in. But what I didn't realize is they way they got everyone's account info was they restored backup tapes from various PLATO installations.

I logged in and was presented with pnotes files from about 30 years earlier.

Surreal.

And it gets weirder because one day I'm in the Living Computer Museum in Seattle and they have a PLATO terminal on display. You were encouraged to use the DEMO account to look at what old networked systems were like, but just for fun I try my FSU account info and... viola! I'm in my FSU account from 1985 on an actual PLATO terminal downstairs talking to an actual (non-emulated) restored CDC6700 upstairs. Like cyber1, they got people's account info from the same backup tapes.