[ih] Book announcement: The Friendly Orange Glow

[Brian Dear]

Of possible interest to the Internet History community:

This month, Pantheon is releasing my new book, “The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture.” This is the first book ever to tell in-depth the history of the PLATO system, who designed and built it, why it’s important, and how it disrupts some of our understandings of when things happened and how.

I argue in the book that PLATO ushered in a social computing revolution in the early 70s before the personal computer revolution had even taken off. While applications on ARPANET were in development around the same time as PLATO, and some pre-date PLATO (email by a couple years), the combination of apps that popped up on the system by 1973-74, namely chat rooms, instant messaging, message forums, email, multiplayer graphical games, and an online newspaper (crowdsourced, even), changed how way people started looking at what computers could do and how they were useful. 

Many innovations emerged as a result of PLATO, making their way into the PC and Internet marketplaces in subsequent decades. Probably the most notable is Lotus Notes, which was named after and inspired by PLATO Notes.

For many years I was on the hunt for RFC 600, the only RFC out of thousands which for years was missing from every RFC archive on the web (finally got that fixed). RFC 600 (from December 1973) had to do with ideas for connecting a PLATO terminal to the Illinois CYBER mainframe via the ARPANET. Why? Officially perhaps to access the thousands of hours of educational lessons on the system. Unofficially? To get to the games! Alas, the PLATO communications architecture did not work well over the packet architecture of ARPANET making usability difficult.

I’ll be on a month-long book tour starting next week in the San Francisco area, then Seattle, Minneapolis, Champaign-Urbana Illinois, Washington DC, and Cambridge MA. I hope some of you can come out for the events. The details of each event are available here:

http://friendlyorangeglow/events.html

More information on the book from the official publisher’s page is here:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545610/the-friendly-orange-glow-by-brian-dear/9781101871553/

Regards,
- Brian

Brian Dear
PLATO History Project
Santa Fe, New Mexico
brian at platohistory.org