The remarkable untold story of PLATO, the computer program and platform created in the 1960s, that marked the true beginning of cyberculture-a book that will rewrite the history of computing and the Internet.
BRIAN DEARis a longtime tech-startup entrepreneur and the founder of companies including Coconut Computing, FlatWorks, Eventful, and Nettle. He has also worked at a variety of dot-com companies, including MP3 and eBay, and he worked in computer-based education for eight years, including five on the PLATO system. He has written for Educational Technology, BYTE, IEEE Expert, and San Diego Reader. Dear lives with his wife in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“Mr. Dear guesses that he spent about 11 years of solid work on his
book over more than 30 years. His diligence shows. Thanks to his
meticulous research and conversational writing style, The
Friendly Orange Glow is an enjoyable and authoritative
treatment of an important piece of our social and technological
heritage.”
—Phil Lapsley, The Wall Street Journal
“Brian Dear has made an important and fascinating contribution to
the history of the digital age. This insightful book tells the
story of the pioneering system of networked computing known as
PLATO. Much of what we enjoy today sprang from PLATO and the
colorful community that created and embraced it.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators and Steve
Jobs
“That Dear was able to interview the many engineers, programmers,
authors, and users of PLATO is a signal achievement. One might say
that The Friendly Orange Glow is a kind of ‘fan non-fiction’; Dear
is to PLATO what Chernow is to Hamilton. . . . Dear has done a
great deal of heavy lifting here to tell a story that needed to be
told and we are much the richer for his telling.”
—Steve Jones, New Media & Society
“A full decade before the history most people believe, PLATO was
the original system that inspired modern computing—and
even the cloud. Designed and built by Midwestern pioneers starting
in 1960, PLATO was still operational when I attended the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the early 1990s. In fact, I took
math classes on it before building Mosaic. This story is a
testament to the importance of both innovation and
timing!”
—Marc Andreessen, cofounder
of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
“I loved this deep unknown history. An incredible tale of a rag-tag
team of students inventing key technologies—flat screens, instant
messaging, networked games, blogging—decades before Silicon Valley,
and then they were totally forgotten. Your mind will be
blown.”
—Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick for Wired Magazine and
author of The Inevitable
“Prodigious research. . . . The story shines through—a fascinating
tale of missed opportunities and blind spots.”
—Sharon Weinberger, Nature
“Though this book is intended for a general audience interested in
computing history, archivists are perhaps ideal readers for Brian
Dear's The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise
of Cyberculture. . . . Built on archival research and hundreds
of oral history interviews collected over more than twenty years,
Dear's book offers not just an excellent example of the end product
of research into the social and user-centered aspects of early
networked computing—an underdeveloped collecting area—it also
provides archivists with a roadmap to the types of sources and
voices that ought to be preserved. . . . From an archival
perspective, The Friendly Orange Glow represents the
meeting of a preservation need and the chronicling of an overlooked
community. . . . Perhaps more important, Dear offers archives
professionals an insight into how best to preserve the context and
the history surrounding the development of networked computer
systems: not only collecting the records of those who designed and
built them, but also gathering the stories of the ordinary people
who gave them content, created communities, and found meaning
through them.”
—Alissa Matheny Helms, The American Archivist
“Absorbing and eye-opening history. . . . Entertaining,
anecdote-laden account waxes more than a little nostalgic about the
little-remembered program . . . behind cyberculture’s flourishing
global impact.”
—Booklist
“This exuberant history . . . offers a lively portrait of the
energy and creativity that a networked world can unleash. . . .
Dear’s sprawling re-creation conveys the excitement of
technological innovation and the freewheeling eccentricity of this
vibrant scene.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Promoted as an educational experiment, PLATO became home to the
first interactive games, electronic communities, student hacking
escapades and online romances. Could Nixon's staff censor online
impeachment discussions? Is online gaming a form of
education? Should systems sell advertising? Here’s the
astonishing story of that first network—how students and
programmers twisted a thousand clunky, connected computers to
change the course of computing.”
—Clifford Stoll, author of High-Tech Heretic
“Packed with delightful details, The Friendly Orange
Glow offers a fascinating account of how the first initial
forays by passionate geeks snowballed to establish digital culture.
This book is an essential read for anyone who takes the internet
for granted.”
—danah boyd, founder of Data & Society and principal researcher,
Microsoft Research
“The word that comes to mind about this book is comprehensive! It
is truly a historical tour de force telling the story of the PLATO
system, its origins and the people who made it happen. I had a
glancing exposure to the program and Don Bitzer in the late 1960s
as I embarked on work at UCLA on the ARPANET. The team was
wrestling with the neon plasma panel display and I came away very
impressed by Bitzer’s palpable can-do enthusiasm. He may have been
Felix Ungar to Daniel Albert’s Oscar Madison, but I have never met
a more determined engineer in my fifty-year career. This book is a
timely reminder of what PLATO people astonishingly accomplished
long before the rest of the world caught on.”
—Vint Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist at
Google
“Finally! Here is the secret history of the Internet’s elder
sibling, the one no one talks about after a mysterious
disappearance.”
—Jaron Lanier, author I Am Not a Gadget
“Long before ‘UI’ signified User Interface, ‘UI’ signified
University of Illinois, where, fifty years ago, much of what we
take for granted as a User Interface for personal and collaborative
computing first took form. To an Internet user, The Friendly
Orange Glow is like finding a trunk in your attic full of
detailed notes kept by your parents chronicling all the adventures
they had before you were born. This is history of the best kind:
authoritative, intimate, and painstakingly assembled, firsthand. A
landmark work.”
—George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral
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