Irata.online: A PLATO service for retro computing enthusiasts

[AlbertCory]

I was not expecting to read about PLATO on HN today.

I was at Illinois for 5 1/2 years, just down Springfield Ave. from the PLATO lab, and yet I never went there except for an experiment in Psych 100. Even working in the Digital Computer Lab, we almost never saw those people. We knew they were doing interesting stuff, but they mostly kept to themselves. My friends had either one class with PLATO (a Latin class) or no classes.

There was some discussion in the Internet history mailing list about the supposedly vital contribution that PLATO made to ARPANET. It isn't really true, sorry. PLATO was influential in a lot of areas, but not that one.

[TMWNN]

>There was some discussion in the Internet history mailing list about the supposedly vital contribution that PLATO made to ARPANET.

Good grief. The Friendly Orange Glow certainly doesn't claim that, so to hear that people would claim otherwise is mystifying. It's that relative lack of contribution to what would become the Internet that caused PLATO's relative obscurity today in computing history compared to Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT's contributions (and, probably, the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude that I imagine drove the discussion you cite).

[Animats]

Does the original PLATO educational content still exist? That might be useful. They had good online math classes, supposedly. It's not about emulating the terminal.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Man, this is a blast from the past. PLATO was primarily before I should have any experience but I was a student at a K12 school district that still used it’s early/mid-aughts incarnation. Some lessons from which would, very rarely, be presented in an emulator. A few lessons just never got rewritten with their later runtime.

[karmakaze]

"Now landing on the planet Irata." -- M.U.L.E.

[ffyring]

Classic. I still play it today with my friends on a C64 that keeps going after 35 years or so.

[jordemort]

Any recipes for self-hosting something like this?

[eafer]

This seems to cover it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181123085448/http://www.contro...

[felixgallo]

the Romulan ship near that dead planet made me want to hyper in and dump torps.

[spudlyo]

I immediately searched for "Empire" on that page, and was disappointed until I saw that image. That was always my favorite part of PLATO.

[vigo]

I know the one and only irata/TRSI... Is that him?

[charles_kaw]

This is a cool project, but I should feel the need to warn anyone who gets too involved: the main person (T. Cherryhomes) behind this has a weird proclivity to tell people to kill themselves. He's done it to me, my friends, and random other strangers. It's disappointing seeing such a cool projected backed by someone so hostile :(

[pinewurst]

Use https://cyber1.org/index.asp instead and avoid a bad actor.

[tschak909]

Libelous statements like this are not cool. If you have an issue with me, let's hash it out.

[Duodreamer]

As such a claim is particularly serious, you are obliged to provide proof.