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.