Abstract
It is uncommon to begin a book review with a disclaimer, but in this case, I feel I must: I was one of the PLATO People Brian Dear describes in The > friendly Orange Glow, having used the system as a student and lesson author in the late 1970s and early 1980s while attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I was not interviewed for the book (I do receive mention in the acknowledgements, but I am not sure it’s merited for merely providing encouragement). I do harbor a degree of nostalgia for PLATO and to knowing exactly what the title of this book is meant to convey in regard to the seductive, comforting, and compelling technology PLATO represented in its heyday. The “orange glow” was not only friendly in an abstract way; it was friendly to me and to my friends.
The feeling of comfort, of friendliness, the powerfully affective experience that comes from use of technological devices, is one familiar to many, perhaps all, users of technology that offers connection to and with others. Indeed, it is PLATO’s representation as a community technology that is at the forefront of this book. It is not an academic book: There is no theory, no discussion of methods, and little reference to scholarly work on the topics of computer history, cyberculture or computer-mediated communication, areas well within the context of the book. Nevertheless, it is a thoroughly researched history of an understudied technology and its consequences, ones that reverberate still and also clearly connect with more well-known histories of the early days of computers and networks in the United States.
There is much to be learned from the story of PLATO. The contrasts and similarities to the stories of other early computer networks are too numerous to mention in a book review. The most obvious comparison between this book and another, on the face of it, is to Katie Hafner’s (2001) The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community, but the two books, like the networks whose stories they tell, are apples and oranges, or Apple and Windows, if you will. Hafner tells the stories of the WELL, its users, and its business; Dear tells the stories of PLATO, its engineers, its developers, its users, the institutions, public and private, that birthed it, nurtured it, and, ultimately, let it languish, and grounds those stories in the context of place and time, before, during and after PLATO.
The > friendly Orange Glow tells the history of the PLATO project’s beginnings as a combination of research not on a single technology but on ones ranging from plasma displays to computer networking to educational technology. That the acronym PLATO stands for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations should alert and alarm anyone with an interest in education. (At least PLATO wore its intentions on its sleeve; today’s systems operate under the altogether more alarming guise of “learning management systems.”) Dear does an excellent job of connecting PLATO’s origins to developments in postwar US educational research on means of automating teaching, clearly drawing links and parallels to work by people like B.F. Skinner, Seymour Papert, and E.L. Thorndike who influenced education researchers and computer scientists in the 1950s, including some at UIUC who were considering creating a “teaching machine” that could be developed around a computer. The results of those early experiments were sometimes intriguing, if ultimately useless, but do beg to be expanded upon in another volume that might, for example, trace the connections between the development of educational technology and computer networking more broadly.
Another thread in the PLATO story concerns the desire by engineers at UIUC to find other uses for computers in the late 1950s and 1960s. Part of the impetus for this was to keep alive and, in today’s parlance, “rebrand” the Control Systems Lab at the university that would likely find funding reduced after the Korean War had ended. An effort was made, based on interests among the lab’s principals, to integrate the lab with other research at the university, and to focus on potential uses for computers in education. There is a tendency to overlook the political dimensions of institutional infrastructures that gave rise to modern computing. Dear’s focus on UIUC’s internal and external politics as they relate to PLATO’s fortunes is most welcome.
The story Dear tells is ultimately one of the history of computing more generally and not just about PLATO. But it is a story unlike others that have been written. While Don Bitzer, PLATO’s principal engineer, was the driving force behind the technology, unlike most, if not all, of its contemporaries, he allowed PLATO to grow as a largely open system, even in its earliest days when the network of terminals connected to it did not go very far beyond the lab in which the mainframe was housed. UIUC students and faculty could easily gain accounts on the system, as could students at the nearby University High School. As Guillaume Latzko-Toth and I wrote about in an article on the topic of social computing, PLATO represented an unusual means of open access to both computer processing and to networked communication (Latzko-Toth and Jones, 2017). Nevertheless PLATO was not an “anything goes” platform. Though for many years it did not require a user ID or login, until gamers, mostly kids, increasingly utilized system resources in ways that negatively impacted educational uses and PLATO developers, the debates about access that Dear describes provide a vivid portrait of the many debates and tensions that have ebbed and flowed for many years in the history of computing and networking. 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. I have already mentioned that this is not a scholarly book, but that may in no small part be a reason for its success. Unlike a traditional academic researcher Dear had both a fan’s dedication to his subject and the luxury of time to pursue it. While there was clearly some urgency to collect the oral histories he needed, there was no tenure clock or other academic milestone looming. All histories of computing and the Internet should be as thorough.
Ultimately, the PLATO story is not only about technology but also about education, and about the embedding of theory in hardware and software. The two primary educational computing systems the National Science Foundation funded for many years in the late 1960s and the 1970s, PLATO and TICCIT (Time-shared, Interactive, Computer-Controlled Information Television) were first and foremost engineering projects; education, it might be said, was the sandbox in which the engineers played and tested a variety of hardware and software designs. That is not to say that educators and educational researchers were not involved, but it is the case that their involvement was in the content of the systems, and not the context, in the instruction but not in the machine. The > friendly Orange Glow is therefore as clear an explication of the intertwining of design and affordances, of the social construction of technology, as one can find in a book that makes no scholarly reference to any of those concepts but that illustrates them better than the majority of scholarly works that center on those topics.
There are, to be sure, areas that beg for greater elucidation, such as the networks of status and power among the principals involved with PLATO. Dear illustrates some of the ways that power was wielded through the system, by virtue of the hierarchies of access designed into it, and through the institution in which it resided. But more could have been said about the social environment and networks at UIUC that played a role in PLATO use. More could also have been said about the performance of race and gender in PLATO conversation threads, and the role women played in PLATO development. Another area ripe for discussion is the use of student labor throughout PLATO’s history at UIUC. Some students were compensated, some were not, and many (students and faculty) were essentially beta testers in all but name. Some interviews with users at UIUC not very closely affiliated with the PLATO project would have added another layer of depth and richness to its history. In the 1970s and 1980s PLATO formed part of the fabric of student life for a great number of the tens of thousands of students who attended UIUC. The impact of PLATO as a gaming platform would have likely been more forcefully characterized were such interviews employed, too. Many students first encountered PLATO in one of their courses but quickly learned about the games available on it and whiled away countless hours at a PLATO terminal. Game studies scholars would no doubt be highly interested in the early forms of networked gaming available on PLATO, and while Dear describes many games and their development the perspective of the “ordinary user” (e.g. one not connected with the PLATO project) would have aided in understanding PLATO’s significance. But these are not so much shortcomings of The > friendly Orange Glow as they are illustrations of the extraordinary medium PLATO afforded and the need for more research about it.
There are additional quibbles one might have, such as with assertions that time sharing begat today’s cloud computing, or that the book does not deal with the rise of cyberculture elsewhere during this time, or that Dear does not delve into a discussion of gender and race in relation to PLATO’s development (though, to his credit, Dear notes the contributions women made to the PLATO project generally). While it would be simple to level the criticism at The > friendly Orange Glow that it is another telling of a “great man” story, it is anything but that. Yes, Don Bitzer, essentially PLATO’s progenitor and long-running champion, is the thread running throughout this story. But his thread is woven together with those of many, many others, and PLATO’s story is told as one of dynamic spatially and temporally situated communities whose time came, and went. It is difficult to imagine a PLATO history in which the principal characters could have been more thoroughly and accurately represented within their contemporary social and cultural context.
Dear notes that PLATO and the ARPANET were never connected and calls it “one of the great tragedies in PLATO’s history” (p. 202). He also notes that while “it is tempting to assert that the PLATO system was the birthplace of social networking and social media …. The historical facts suggest otherwise; at best, the answer is a nuanced, ‘not really, but early signs had begun to show’” (p. 258). By the 1970s, PLATO had evolved from a platform built on what one can do on it to one that users viewed primarily as a means of connecting and communicating with others. PLATO is, if nothing else, nuanced in myriad such ways. Dear illustrates the possible directions in which it could have developed and dives deeply into the ones in which it did, making clear the reasons for its development, adoption and demise. Dear tells a fascinating story, one that any reader interested in, as the book’s subtitle puts it, the rise of cyberculture. Too often our stories are subsumed under the weight of the requirements of journals, reviewers, publishers or committees. There is a place for such requirements, to be sure. But it is important to keep in mind that some stories may be best told as historical narratives that do not easily hew to scholarly timelines and structures but instead demand their own unearthing and telling. 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 this telling.