I think there is SOME truth to this. I remember being there and thinking if this could go beyond their confines but it never tookoff!:)

I used plato and found it pretty meh.

MECC on the other hand

what was MECC?

Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. They put ttys and later silent 700s in elementary schools and libraries connected by dialup to a CDC. they had a early mud called Milieu that I spent a lot of time on...and I wrote some basic and pascal programs. in fact I think I took a programming class at some kind of summer school at the community college that was hosted there too.

MECC also published software for the Apple ][, including the first version of Oregon Trail that kids played in schools.

thinking about this now. its pretty clear to me that that early education in computing gave me this career. as a youth I never wanted to pursue it, but when it was computing or minimum wage for the 8th year in a row - I already had the tools I needed to start.

MERITSS/MECC was a fun, funky time-share system. It used multiple peripherals to feed one central CPU (with not much memory). The access I used had an acoustic modem (using a dedicated line) and a Model-33 teleprinter with a ASCII paper tape reader/puncher for storage.

On good days, the time-share part was transparent. But there were dozens of access points; on rare days when most of them were in use, you could press a key and wait 10 or more seconds to get the character echoed back to the printer.

One day I got one hour of access to a plasma-screen PLATO, and it was amazing. Never again even saw another.

btw, in "The Big Bucks" I have a (fictional) grad student Matt Feingold at U Minn. I've never even been to Minneapolis, but I did at least verify that there was married student housing, and they were not in the initial group for CSNet.

Matt sneak-installs ARCNet at the university, which I'm pretty sure never happened. There's also a fictional French professor "Dr. Caron" who talks about the (real) Minitel.

The Minitel actually was pretty decent, and they had a revenue model vastly different from what we've ended up with (the cost just ends up on your phone bill, and the service providers pay the phone company). I'm not saying this would be better, but at least no ads!

That's true except for the bit about Plato terminals in the library. In the school across town, in the high-school in Springfield, and in colleges in Dover, Tallahassee and Dallas.

I mean sure. Except for those places, the only place you could find a multi-thousand dollar PLATO terminal was the old RF research building. And CDC headquarters and a one or two at Cray's lab.

Yeah, they could have joined the Internet revolution, but Minneapolis was the center for CDC and Cray, and they just missed it. Maybe "snooted it" is the better term.

Gopher, out of Minneapolis, was "the Internet revolution" for a year or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) .

Once long ago I worked for Convex Comouter Corporation. We sold mini-super-computers. I was on the team that converted all our docs to lightly formatted text files so we could distribute them via gopher.

Three days after putting everything up on gopher one of my co-workers came in with a tape from NCSA saying "hey. I got this interesting program from the NCSA guys. They call it a web browser."

(But early versions of mosaic and navigator understood Gopher URLs, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.)

I was at Illinois during 1992-1997. The school had a number of gopher services, and then ... poof, Mosaic. I think we set up our research group's http server in 1994. One of the PIs wanted to support both gopher and http, but by then the writing was already clearly on the wall, and we only did http.

There are some gopher diehards about. http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw . The relevant Wikipedia page says 'In February 2022 Veronica indexed 325 gopher servers.'

I went to FSU in Tallahassee for my undergrad. The PLATO machines were used for computer-based training for lower-level math classes. The only reason I knew about them was because I worked in the Math Help Center right across the hall, with an overlapping student user base.

I remember the orange screens. And remember a "squash the bug" game possible due to the press-sensitive screen. But while I remember the admin mentioning some of PLATO's broader capabilities, that wasn't part of the student culture or knowledge base.

The local online community, for example, was based around the CONFER program running on the CDC Cyber, a machine accessible via several unlocked terminal rooms running dumb terminals.

I then went to UIUC (Illinois) for graduate school, in the physics department. PLATO was much more integrated into school life there. But this was also the time of Archie and Gopher, and of course the Mosaic web browser came out of UIUC shortly after I arrived. I only ever used PLATO as a T.A., to enter undergrad grades.

You’re missing the terminals in an academic music library in Perth, Western Australia, and terminals in a local jail there too. Term-talk, and the games, and p-notes were transformational for some of us, who later went on in tech roles.