[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Clem Cole]

FWIW: Since Plato was just brought up, I'll point a vector to some folks.
 If you read Dear's book, it tends to credit the walled garden' system
Plato with a lot of the things the Internet would eventually be known.  How
much truth there is, I can not say.  But there is a lot of good stuff in
here and it really did impact a lot of us as we certainly had seen that
scheme, when we started to do things later.

So ... if  you have not yet read it, see if you can get a copy of Brian
Dear's *The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and
the Dawn of Cyberculture* ISBN-10 1101871555

In my own case, Plato was used for some Physics courses and I
personally never was one of the 'Plato ga-ga' type folks, although I did
take on course using it and thought the graphics were pretty slick.  But, I
had all the computing power I needed with full ARPANET access between the
Computer Center and CMU's EE and CS Depts.  But I do have friends that were
Physics, Chem E, and Mat Sci that all thought it was amazing and liked it
much better than the required FORTRAN course they had to take using TSS on
the IBM 360/67.