John Hunter’s World Peace Game, Roger Ebert, and the PLATO System

I remember Plato. In our lab, it was used mostly to play John Daleske's Empire, a space game. It was graphical and the coolest thing around!

Then years later, working on 802.11 radio drivers, I ran into John at a job. One of my youthful heroes! And a regular guy, plugging away writing software for industry.

Anyway, most folks who saw Plato were affected by it. Lightyears ahead of other text-terminal computers of the time.

My aunt gave me the author’s book as a gift a few years ago. It was quite an astounding read.

I studied at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and we had a Plato system donated by Control Data for e-learning.

It was rather awesome esp when I discovered the games "directory" ... it had a asteroids clone.

Also of note, Ray Ozzie, who was best known for creating Lotus Notes (later causing IBM to purchase Lotus), also worked on PLATO [1] while an undergrad at U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Lotus Notes was based in part on his experiences using the PLATO Notes group messaging system

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie

I have to wonder what the best in class teaching systems are for computers these days. Not "edutainment", but real educational approaches.

Ebert newspaper articles from 1962 are in the medium article. Discusses helping high school students using PLATO in 1962!