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

by Brian Dear Narrated by George Newbern

Overview

At a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even born, a group of visionary engineers and designers-some of them only high school students-in the late 1960s and 1970s created a computer system called PLATO, which was light-years ahead in experimenting with how people would learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected computers. Not only did PLATO engineers make significant hardware breakthroughs with plasma displays and touch screens but PLATO programmers also came up with a long list of software innovations: chat rooms, instant messaging, message boards, screen savers, multiplayer games, online newspapers, interactive fiction, and emoticons. Together, the PLATO community pioneered what we now collectively engage in as cyberculture. They were among the first to identify and also realize the potential and scope of the social interconnectivity of computers, well before the creation of the internet. PLATO was the foundational model for every online community that was to follow in its footsteps.*

The Friendly Orange Glow is the first history to recount in fascinating detail the remarkable accomplishments and inspiring personal stories of the PLATO community. The addictive nature of PLATO both ruined many a college career and launched pathbreaking multimillion-dollar software products. Its development, impact, and eventual disappearance provides an instructive case study of technological innovation and disruption, project management, and missed opportunities. Above all, The Friendly Orange Glow at last reveals new perspectives on the origins of social computing and our internet-infatuated world.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

08/14/2017
Dear, a tech entrepreneur, recounts the development of the little-known PLATO, a teaching platform invented at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the 1960s, in this exuberant history. The computer-based system featured cutting-edge flat-panel plasma displays that glowed orange and were connected by phone lines to a central mainframe computer that supplied lessons and tests to students at far-flung campuses. Supervised by charismatic professor Don Bitzer, PLATO never caught on as a teaching tool, but its fast telecom links and shared apps nurtured an online culture decades before the advent of the web. It fostered a community of enthusiastic teenage hackers, message boards and chatrooms, a primitive news site and blogs, digital hieroglyphics resembling today’s emoji, and hundreds of slackers playing addictive multiuser computer games all night. Dear’s sprawling re-creation conveys the excitement of technological innovation and the freewheeling eccentricity of this vibrant scene—along with the tediousness of IT procedural nitty gritty (“It was using a -jumpout- command, I jumped right into the middle of, I don’t know, was it the ‘edit’ program or something?”). Although bloated with extraneous backstory, long-winded anecdotes, and overstated praise of a dead-end technology, the book offers a lively portrait of the energy and creativity that a networked world can unleash. Photos. Agent: Regina Ryan, Regina Ryan Publishing Enterprises. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

Mr. Dear guesses that he spent about 11 years of solid work on his book over more than 30 years. His diligence shows. Thanks to his meticulous research and conversational writing style, The Friendly Orange Glow is an enjoyable and authoritative treatment of an important piece of our social and technological heritage.” 
—Phil Lapsley, The Wall Street Journal

“Brian Dear has made an important and fascinating contribution to the history of the digital age. This insightful book tells the story of the pioneering system of networked computing known as PLATO.  Much of what we enjoy today sprang from PLATO and the colorful community that created and embraced it.” 
—Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators and Steve Jobs

“That Dear was able to interview the many engineers, programmers, authors, and users of PLATO is a signal achievement. One might say that The Friendly Orange Glow is a kind of ‘fan non-fiction’; Dear is to PLATO what Chernow is to Hamilton. . . . Dear has done a great deal of heavy lifting here to tell a story that needed to be told and we are much the richer for his telling.” 
—Steve Jones, New Media & Society

“A full decade before the history most people believe, PLATO was the original system that inspired modern computing—and even the cloud. Designed and built by Midwestern pioneers starting in 1960, PLATO was still operational when I attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the early 1990s. In fact, I took math classes on it before building Mosaic. This story is a testament to the importance of both innovation and timing!” 
—Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
 
“I loved this deep unknown history. An incredible tale of a rag-tag team of students inventing key technologies—flat screens, instant messaging, networked games, blogging—decades before Silicon Valley, and then they were totally forgotten. Your mind will be blown.”  
—Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick for Wired Magazine and author of The Inevitable

“Prodigious research. . . . The story shines through—a fascinating tale of missed opportunities and blind spots.”  
—Sharon Weinberger, Nature

“Absorbing and eye-opening history. . . . Entertaining, anecdote-laden account waxes more than a little nostalgic about the little-remembered program . . . behind cyberculture’s flourishing global impact.”  
—Booklist
 
“This exuberant history . . . offers a lively portrait of the energy and creativity that a networked world can unleash. . . . Dear’s sprawling re-creation conveys the excitement of technological innovation and the freewheeling eccentricity of this vibrant scene.”  
—Publishers Weekly

“Promoted as an educational experiment, PLATO became home to the first interactive games, electronic communities, student hacking escapades and online romances. Could Nixon's staff censor online impeachment discussions?  Is online gaming a form of education?  Should systems sell advertising?  Here’s the astonishing story of that first network—how students and programmers twisted a thousand clunky, connected computers to change the course of computing.”
—Clifford Stoll, author of High-Tech Heretic

“Packed with delightful details, The Friendly Orange Glow offers a fascinating account of how the first initial forays by passionate geeks snowballed to establish digital culture. This book is an essential read for anyone who takes the internet for granted.” 
—danah boyd, founder of Data & Society and principal researcher, Microsoft Research

“The word that comes to mind about this book is comprehensive! It is truly a historical tour de force telling the story of the PLATO system, its origins and the people who made it happen. I had a glancing exposure to the program and Don Bitzer in the late 1960s as I embarked on work at UCLA on the ARPANET. The team was wrestling with the neon plasma panel display and I came away very impressed by Bitzer’s palpable can-do enthusiasm. He may have been Felix Ungar to Daniel Albert’s Oscar Madison, but I have never met a more determined engineer in my fifty-year career. This book is a timely reminder of what PLATO people astonishingly accomplished long before the rest of the world caught on.”  
—Vint Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google
 
“Finally!  Here is the secret history of the Internet’s elder sibling, the one no one talks about after a mysterious disappearance.” 
—Jaron Lanier, author I Am Not a Gadget

“Long before ‘UI’ signified User Interface, ‘UI’ signified University of Illinois, where, fifty years ago, much of what we take for granted as a User Interface for personal and collaborative computing first took form. To an Internet user, The Friendly Orange Glow is like finding a trunk in your attic full of detailed notes kept by your parents chronicling all the adventures they had before you were born. This is history of the best kind: authoritative, intimate, and painstakingly assembled, firsthand. A landmark work.”
—George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral

Library Journal

10/15/2017
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. VERDICT Painstakingly researched, this is a solid alternative for those who only know the history of networked computing as the story of the Arpanet/Internet.—Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Kirkus Reviews

2017-08-30
An exploration of the computer system that was too far ahead of its time to succeed but whose legacy quietly endures.Techno-critics who worry that computers are turning us into Pavlovian experiments might find ammunition for such an argument in tech entrepreneur Dear's history of PLATO, which grew from B.F. Skinner's theories of programmed learning—the same one that taught pigeons how to peck at levers for rewards in the form of bird seed. The author calls his book the "biography of a vision," and he's quite right to do so, though that vision in practice turns out to be less mechanistic than the purely Skinner-ian one. In fact, PLATO, a learning environment that found a home at the University of Illinois, grew from the dream of "building a computer that could teach" using both natural language and artificial intelligence; from that learning impulse also grew some of the first computer-based communities. Early experiments and programs, Dear writes, are not well-documented, so there's a little learned guesswork in figuring out what code whisperers like Donald Bitzer and Dan Alpert were up to. The story picks up speed and grounding alike when it gets into the heart of the techno-libertarian 1960s, when companies like Xerox and Control Data Corporation began to suss out the possibilities PLATO offered, including some of the first graphics programs. For their part, tech geeks used the platform for additional pleasures, including the earliest Dungeons & Dragons ports. In the end, writes Dear, for many computer aficionados, especially in the 1970s, PLATO became a platform for learning about PLATO: "The system itself was the thing." Those aficionados spun off into other realms, including the first usable graphical interface for the brand-new World Wide Web, which changed the world even as PLATO receded into history—not to mention "Castle Wolfenstein," which has newfound relevance today. A readable tech history, but it helps to have a background in computers to get the most out of Dear's account. As good an account of PLATO as we're likely to get—or to need.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169152869
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/14/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

PREFACE
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Friendly Orange Glow"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Brian Dear.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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