The Friendly Orange Glow

August 14, 2017
Dear, a tech entrepreneur, recounts the development of the little-known PLATO, a teaching platform invented at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the 1960s, in this exuberant history. The computer-based system featured cutting-edge flat-panel plasma displays that glowed orange and were connected by phone lines to a central mainframe computer that supplied lessons and tests to students at far-flung campuses. Supervised by charismatic professor Don Bitzer, PLATO never caught on as a teaching tool, but its fast telecom links and shared apps nurtured an online culture decades before the advent of the web. It fostered a community of enthusiastic teenage hackers, message boards and chatrooms, a primitive news site and blogs, digital hieroglyphics resembling today’s emoji, and hundreds of slackers playing addictive multiuser computer games all night. Dear’s sprawling re-creation conveys the excitement of technological innovation and the freewheeling eccentricity of this vibrant scene—along with the tediousness of IT procedural nitty gritty (“It was using a -jumpout- command, I jumped right into the middle of, I don’t know, was it the ‘edit’ program or something?”). Although bloated with extraneous backstory, long-winded anecdotes, and overstated praise of a dead-end technology, the book offers a lively portrait of the energy and creativity that a networked world can unleash. Photos. Agent: Regina Ryan, Regina Ryan Publishing Enterprises.

September 15, 2017
An exploration of the computer system that was too far ahead of its time to succeed but whose legacy quietly endures.Techno-critics who worry that computers are turning us into Pavlovian experiments might find ammunition for such an argument in tech entrepreneur Dear's history of PLATO, which grew from B.F. Skinner's theories of programmed learning--the same one that taught pigeons how to peck at levers for rewards in the form of bird seed. The author calls his book the "biography of a vision," and he's quite right to do so, though that vision in practice turns out to be less mechanistic than the purely Skinner-ian one. In fact, PLATO, a learning environment that found a home at the University of Illinois, grew from the dream of "building a computer that could teach" using both natural language and artificial intelligence; from that learning impulse also grew some of the first computer-based communities. Early experiments and programs, Dear writes, are not well-documented, so there's a little learned guesswork in figuring out what code whisperers like Donald Bitzer and Dan Alpert were up to. The story picks up speed and grounding alike when it gets into the heart of the techno-libertarian 1960s, when companies like Xerox and Control Data Corporation began to suss out the possibilities PLATO offered, including some of the first graphics programs. For their part, tech geeks used the platform for additional pleasures, including the earliest Dungeons & Dragons ports. In the end, writes Dear, for many computer aficionados, especially in the 1970s, PLATO became a platform for learning about PLATO: "The system itself was the thing." Those aficionados spun off into other realms, including the first usable graphical interface for the brand-new World Wide Web, which changed the world even as PLATO receded into history--not to mention "Castle Wolfenstein," which has newfound relevance today. A readable tech history, but it helps to have a background in computers to get the most out of Dear's account. As good an account of PLATO as we're likely to get--or to need.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2017

Tech entrepreneur Dear distills interviews and oral histories compiled over 30 years into this history of PLATO, an educational technology platform that became a vibrant programmer community prizing creativity and innovation. Developed at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, PLATO was a mainframe- and terminal-based automated learning system. Later developments included a lesson-authoring language, behind-the-scenes messaging and bulletin board systems, and eventually networked multiplayer games--all essentially invisible to the students taking lessons at PLATO terminals around the nation. Dear argues that in addition to hardware innovations such as touch screens and plasma displays, PLATO presaged important components of cyber culture and social media such as instant messaging, crowdsourcing, and emoticons. Control Data Corporation (which supplied the computers) acquired the platform in the 1970s but was unsuccessful in its attempts to commercialize the product for corporate training and public education purposes. At times the biographical minutiae and vast array of names can overwhelm readers, but Dear's exhaustive research helps to bring the subjects' personalities to life. VERDICT Painstakingly researched, this is a solid alternative for those who only know the history of networked computing as the story of the Arpanet/Internet.--Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2017
Anyone who marvels at the rapid ascendance of finger-sensitive smartphone screens in the last decade might be surprised to learn that the touch-screen's development occurred as far back as 1972 and had no involvement from anyone named Jobs or Gates. As tech entrepreneur Dear points out in this absorbing and eye-opening history of the now-defunct computer system dubbed PLATOan acronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operationstouch screens were not the only innovation PLATO's architects inspired. E-mail, multi-user games, and even a primitive form of the Internet all arose as side benefits of the computer-based teaching tool designed mostly for students at the University of Illinois. Among the large cast of characters Dear profiles are PLATO's charismatic supervisor, professor Don Bitzer, and dozens of hacker students who tweaked the system using early chat rooms. While the author's entertaining, anecdote-laden account waxes more than a little nostalgic about the little-remembered program, his audience will mostly be computer geeks and social historians researching the backstory behind cyberculture's flourishing global influence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)