The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture Paperback – October 2, 2018

“The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear documents the “Dawn of Cyberculture” with deep, readable details of the personalities, the politics, the culture, and stories of the development of the PLATO system. It reminds me of the quality writing of Tracy Kidder in “The Soul of the Machine” (1981). “The Friendly Orange Glow” strongly deserves the five stars Amazon allows. (Though six would be more accurate.)What is PLATO, you ask? The stuffy description would be that it was started in 1960 as a computer-based education system, a way to improve the learning (training?) of the United States to help keep ahead of the Soviet Union. It starts in the 1950s, touching on the impetus and mindset caused by the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The Cold War.But, the PLATO system evolved to become much more than that. PLATO IV expanded the horizons of being an on-campus system in the 1960s to a far-reaching networked system in the early 1970s. In 1973 and 1974 alone, interactive chat, screen sharing, person notes (email), notesfiles (topic discussion groups), multi-player networked games, animated text graphics (animated emojis), graphic logon pages (Goodle search page), and more all provided a social dimension much broader than just being used for training.“The Friendly Orange Glow” (TFOG) details the culture in which this environment thrived; the culture led by Don Bitzer and supported by the creative team at the University of Illinois. This development approach helped support the development of these many capabilities.It also highlights stories, as Brian Dear suggests, three books worth of stories, with heart and emotion, the highs and pitfalls of online culture. How careers were made; how careers were lost by the addictive nature that PLATO affected some, many flunking from college or getting divorced because of the interactive networked games or discussion groups.In late 1975, an interactive story, Guanogap, was released in installments. It was written as if you were watching over the shoulder of the narrator while he interacts with various characters, reads notes and pnotes (email). You see it happen. It is a snapshot of the culture, of the life on the PLATO system in 1975. I looked forward to every installment. I have yet to see an implementation of an interactive story anywhere on the Internet.Wait, you say, weren’t interactive network games first started on the Internet in the 1990s? (Or, if you knew of the Xwindows systems of the 1980s, weren’t they developed there?)Wasn’t networked computer-based training (CBT) first done using MOOCs in the 2000s? No. The first time-sharing use of a computer was developed for PLATO in the early 1960s.John Brunner published my favorite read, “The Shockwave Rider” in 1975. I re-read it every few years and remain astounded at how forward looking it was, describing a twenty-first century world dominated by computer networks, hackers, cyber crime, and more. I don’t know whether Brunner ever saw or knew about the PLATO system, but the book also describes aspects of what PLATO was at the time in the early 1970s and what it could have become. The Internet has become that network. It first existed on the PLATO network.You can still SEE and TOUCH the PLATO system live on the Internet. You can still use Notes, talkomatic, term-talk, and play the multitude of interactive games. Every Sunday evening, there is a pickup game in Empire. You might even see me there, though I tend to get killed a lot.Guanogap is also there for you to read and experience.

If you have any interest in the history of the computer age, this book is a must-read.The PLATO story is doubly amazing: first for what the community created in terms of online culture, and second for the extent to which the story has been almost completely forgotten by history. The author makes an analogy with another field: there is the "saltwater" school of legal theory, on both coasts, and the "freshwater" school, in the interior (e.g. Chicago). In almost every history ever written about the rise of computer and online culture, only the saltwater (Silicon Valley and Cambridge) perspective is represented, never that of the flyover regions, in particular Urbana-Champaign, IL.I have been involved with computers since the time when PLATO was being developed, in the 1960s, and while I knew of the existence of PLATO I had no idea of the extent of the phenomenon or the lists of "firsts" it racked up.Here's my theory after reading The Friendly Orange Glow: once you put a sufficient number and density of people online to communicate with flexible, growable tools, something like what we now know as the Internet culture will emerge. Certain features will develop: chat, email, threaded conversations both synchronous and asynchronous, and especially, multi-player games. Human experience in all its forms will come to be represented there: vocation, love, money, life and death.PLATO was the first environment that offered all the requisites for the growth of an online culture -- and it all transpired 20 to 35 years before personal computers and the rise of the Internet.Here are some things I didn't know before reading this book:- The novelist Richard Powers, winner of the National Book Award and a MacArthur "genius" grant, was immersed in the PLATO world when young, and the experience colored all of his literary work since.- Both DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) Notes and Lotus Notes came directly out of the earlier PLATO Notes, and were produced by people who had been steeped in PLATO as college students.- One of the most successful game authors in the history of computing, Brodie Lockard, was almost completely paralyzed; and PLATO essentially saved his life, before bestowing on him a rewarding and lucrative lifelong career.The geeks among us will especially enjoy this book, but it has plenty of human interest stories and historical surprises that anyone can appreciate. Brian Dear is a masterful storyteller, and the birth, rise, Cambrian explosion of creativity, and slow death of the PLATO culture reads like a gripping novel. The amount of research behind Dear's accomplishment is nothing short of flabbergasting.

Brian did an excellent job at documenting a system it seems was one of the best kept secrets outside of thePLATO community. As it evolved from Don Bitzer's initial creation in 1960 to it's demise in 2015, Brian Dearbrought all of the important moments from beginning to end to print. I knew a lot about it because I lived it during it's heydey in the 70s. The names and events were familiar but there was so much more that I never knew that wouldn't have to come to light had Brian not written this book. Between the reading the book itself and reading the acknowledgments at the end, you can see how hard the author worked over the 30 years to write it and get it right. I think Brian was as addicted to writing this as many of us were to using PLATO in the 70s. I can only repeat what so many have penned before me. PLATOwas something that was not well known then or now except to the 1000 to 13,000 users at it's peak.While moderately commercially successful it was mis-understood and mis-managed as a a business.Had it not happened, the internet would be much different from what it is today. The book is about those people who made PLATO the fore-runner of what we know the internet to be today. It's about how those people who went on to take those PLATO ideas and make them part of our culture now. Where did the idea of chat rooms, messaging, texting group forums and gaming with players around the world start......PLATO. Well I can't add anymore or put it any better than all those before me except, read it.It's an eye opener and you will find yourself rooting for the good guys most of the time. And you will figure out who the Good Guys are.

I guess everyone has different desires for details. For me, this otherwise excellent book could have been a couple 100 pages shorter.

This is a meticulous account of the PLATO computing systems that ran during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The author has worked on this book for a quarter of a century and this effort is clearly visible in the final prose. The result is a highly comprehensive retelling of the story of PLATO, the most important computer system that people have never heard of. Anyone interested in the history of computing and/or online culture should read this book. Highly recommended!

J'ai eu l'extrême privilège de faire partie de ces pioniers qui ont pu faire leurs armes sur Plato (auteur de 1979 à 1983 pendant mes études universitaires). Ce livre est génial et fait remonter de très nombreux souvenirs à la surface.Le style naratif est aussi très agréable.Je recommande très certainement ce livre à ceux qui ont fait partie de cette merveilleuse aventure et aussi à ceux qui désirent voir l'histoire de l'informatique moderne par un autre bout de la lorgnette.

Delightful dialogue, annecdotes and archival images/diagrams make this book a fascinating read for anyone. Fantastically interesting subject too, it's an untold story that tells a lot - our economy would look miles different without PLATO. Heartily recommended to any internet history or technology enthusiast's.