Curious Case of PLATO: the cold war #internet
▻https://hackernoon.com/curious-case-of-plato-the-cold-war-internet-785a98076737?source=rss----3
Curious Case of PLATO: The cold war InternetMillennials, myself included, would never get it.Because millennials are accustomed to hear of revolutions born in a garage (Google, Apple, Amazon) or a dorm room (Facebook, Wordpress), hitting eight figure revenues in the cradle, sometimes despite being loss-making.They miss a point: those innovations are built from solid blocks invented decades ago - inside the lonesome corridors of military labs and Universities.PLATO, a contrived acronym that stands for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, was one such founding stone.On the face of it, it was merely a classroom teaching simulator system, powered by military grade vacuum tube mainframes and arrays of dumb terminals made of displays and keyboards, spread through out university (...)
#internet-culture #programming #computer-history #technology