> Unlike ARPANET, PLATO was not designed to be a seed that sprouted into a tree of networked computing. Rather, it was a single branch that grew in the wrong direction, and subsequently withered.
I'd disagree to an extent, as multiple PLATO sites, each with its own CDC mainframe host, were networked with one another. The point stands that the terminals-into-mainframes paradigm persisted, but almost anything that would have been on ARPAnet in that era would have been a large (VAX-class or bigger) system save for the lucky few with Sun workstations.
I was at UIUC in the mid-1980s, and I thought it odd that PLATO and ARPAnet were isolated from one another. Usenet was available via the "notes" client that mimicked PLATO notes in style, but was never linked to PLATO. I guess it didn't help that PLATO lived in the CDC mainframe world and spoke neither ASCII nor EBCDIC.
Online networked discussion forums, online chat, even MMOs existed on PLATO decades ago, and not integrating it with ARPAnet was a huge wasted opportunity.
I'd disagree to an extent, as multiple PLATO sites, each with its own CDC mainframe host, were networked with one another. The point stands that the terminals-into-mainframes paradigm persisted, but almost anything that would have been on ARPAnet in that era would have been a large (VAX-class or bigger) system save for the lucky few with Sun workstations.
I was at UIUC in the mid-1980s, and I thought it odd that PLATO and ARPAnet were isolated from one another. Usenet was available via the "notes" client that mimicked PLATO notes in style, but was never linked to PLATO. I guess it didn't help that PLATO lived in the CDC mainframe world and spoke neither ASCII nor EBCDIC.
Online networked discussion forums, online chat, even MMOs existed on PLATO decades ago, and not integrating it with ARPAnet was a huge wasted opportunity.