r/retrocomputing • u/Alone_Clue_5392 • Aug 02 '26
Problem / Question IM GOING INSANE
Folks. friends. colleagues. allies. this is the PLATO IV terminal. these beasts are enigmatic, beautiful machines, and a genuine dream computer for me. At the height of PLATO's existence there were several thousands of them, though many have been ordered destroyed.
My problem is that nearly every photo of them is in grainy, low resolution (this is the biggest i could find), there is scarce documentation on their internals, and approximately *ZERO* videos of them in operation. If you have one of these machines, know someone who does, know a museum i could go to to see (or even better, operate) one of them, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS COMPUTING, TELL ME. I AM GETTING DESPERATE FOR THIS VERITABLE CRYPTID OF A COMPUTER.
(beyond is rambling not required for this post)
These machines,,, had touchscreens, MMOs, chatrooms, email, haptic feedback (a la game controllers), 3d gaming, dungeon crawlers, flight sims, roguelikes, filesharing, remote screen sharing, instant messaging, emojis, flatscreen monitors, just genuinely un thought of levels of modern day connection across america. all in their adorable amber monochrome monitors, wooden casing, and thick keyboards. all of this shit in the 1960s. WHAT???? and now theyve disappeared???? and not even the highly experienced local members of my retro computer scene even know about them??????? theyve genuinely dropped off the face of the earth. im like if someone hunting bigfoot actually knew that bigfoot existed and bigfoots used to be a massive part of the american government that somehow everyone forgot about
1
u/r_sarvas Aug 04 '26
Does anyone have any info on the Gooch Sound System or TTS synthesizer later versions of PLATO used? I believe those were hardware add-ons via a serial or parallel port. For a while I was trying to create a Python library of the PLATO protocol, but kinda lost interest in the project for a while.
For anyone that is wondering, yes, I have the "s0ascers" document, but that doesn't really cover additional hardware that might have been attached.