from Hacker News

John Hunter’s World Peace Game, Roger Ebert, and the PLATO System

by brianstorms on 6/8/20, 8:13 PM with 9 comments

• by JoeAltmaier on 6/8/20, 9:10 PM

  I remember Plato. In our lab, it was used mostly to play John Daleske's Empire, a space game. It was graphical and the coolest thing around!

  Then years later, working on 802.11 radio drivers, I ran into John at a job. One of my youthful heroes! And a regular guy, plugging away writing software for industry.

  Anyway, most folks who saw Plato were affected by it. Lightyears ahead of other text-terminal computers of the time.

• by krallja on 6/8/20, 11:29 PM

  My aunt gave me the author’s book as a gift a few years ago. It was quite an astounding read.

• by tibbydudeza on 6/9/20, 7:12 AM

  I studied at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and we had a Plato system donated by Control Data for e-learning.

  It was rather awesome esp when I discovered the games "directory" ... it had a asteroids clone.

• by toss1 on 6/9/20, 5:43 PM

  Also of note, Ray Ozzie, who was best known for creating Lotus Notes (later causing IBM to purchase Lotus), also worked on PLATO [1] while an undergrad at U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Lotus Notes was based in part on his experiences using the PLATO Notes group messaging system

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie

• by pnathan on 6/9/20, 4:30 AM

  I have to wonder what the best in class teaching systems are for computers these days. Not "edutainment", but real educational approaches.

• by davidf18 on 6/8/20, 10:42 PM

  Ebert newspaper articles from 1962 are in the medium article. Discusses helping high school students using PLATO in 1962!