I worked on the PLATO system beginning in high school as a 15-year old through college. (The building where PLATO was located was diagonal south-west of my high school). David Woolley who is created Notes mentioned in the article was an undergraduate when he wrote Notes.
PLATO not only had social networking but was the genesis for other technologies. The orange screen in the article was invented at PLATO and was the genesis for the color plasma TV screen. In fact, Larry Webber, the or a key inventor of the color plasma TV screen was a post-doc in the lab. Ray Ozzie who took over from Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft was also there. The PLATO terminals had touch screens.
For software development, when there were compilation errors, you could press a single key and you were given an explanation of the error.
Also, the PLATO system has been resurrected. You can run a terminal emulator from your computer and log into the PLATO system and experience and use it much as it was used 40 years ago using a terminal emulator on this website:
Use of the notes program mentioned in the article starts in 1974.
As undergraduates some of us would get EE degrees while working our way through college programming computers. We were in this very fertile environment of both software and hardware and we got an enormous amount of autonomy.
One thing that Notes did better than modern threaded comment systems or web forums was that it had a sequencer that would allow you to quickly jump to and read whatever new responses and/or notes that were created since the last time you read Notes.
I never used Notes on Plato, but it was faithfully recreated on The Evergreen State College's timeshared BASIC system running on an HP3000, and then again to an AOS/VS based DG Eclipse MV10000 system. My best friends today are all people I met on Notes in the 80s. In high school my pal and I spent a summer vacation coding a Notes-like system (including sequencer) for a NewDos/80 GREENEMACHINE BBS. Good times.
I feel lucky to have spent time in the 80s learning about Plato (ok, mostly EMPIRE) on aging dusty terminals in the back of TESC's terminal room. Glad to see that you can still interact with it via cyber1.org. Can't wait for my account to get created.
PLATO not only had social networking but was the genesis for other technologies. The orange screen in the article was invented at PLATO and was the genesis for the color plasma TV screen. In fact, Larry Webber, the or a key inventor of the color plasma TV screen was a post-doc in the lab. Ray Ozzie who took over from Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft was also there. The PLATO terminals had touch screens. For software development, when there were compilation errors, you could press a single key and you were given an explanation of the error.
Also, the PLATO system has been resurrected. You can run a terminal emulator from your computer and log into the PLATO system and experience and use it much as it was used 40 years ago using a terminal emulator on this website:
http://cyber1.org/
Here is a list of the notes starting from 1972. An image was made from the line printer at the time: http://archives.library.illinois.edu/e-records/index.php?dir...
Use of the notes program mentioned in the article starts in 1974.
As undergraduates some of us would get EE degrees while working our way through college programming computers. We were in this very fertile environment of both software and hardware and we got an enormous amount of autonomy.
PLATO leader Don Bitzer had enormous trust in the abilities of even high school students to make contributions. http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1997/03/2614