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

Tech entrepreneur Dear distills interviews and oral histories compiled over 30 years into this history of PLATO, an educational technology platform that became a vibrant programmer community prizing creativity and innovation. Developed at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, PLATO was a mainframe- and terminal-based automated learning system. Later developments included a lesson-authoring language, behind-the-scenes messaging and bulletin board systems, and eventually networked multiplayer games—all essentially invisible to the students taking lessons at PLATO terminals around the nation. Dear argues that in addition to hardware innovations such as touch screens and plasma displays, PLATO presaged important components of cyber culture and social media such as instant messaging, crowdsourcing, and emoticons. Control Data Corporation (which supplied the computers) acquired the platform in the 1970s but was unsuccessful in its attempts to commercialize the product for corporate training and public education purposes. At times the biographical minutiae and vast array of names can overwhelm readers, but Dear's exhaustive research helps to bring the subjects' personalities to life.