[ih] Book announcement: The Friendly Orange Glow

[Vint Cerf]

i have an advance copy - it is a great read especially since I knew some of
the people in the book!

vint


On Thu, Nov 2, 2017 at 2:52 PM, Brian Dear <brian at platohistory.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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