{"id":163155,"date":"2023-05-01T17:23:44","date_gmt":"2023-05-01T22:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/plato-how-an-educational-computer-system-from-the-60s-shaped-the-future"},"modified":"2023-05-01T17:23:44","modified_gmt":"2023-05-01T22:23:44","slug":"plato-how-an-educational-computer-system-from-the-60s-shaped-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/plato-how-an-educational-computer-system-from-the-60s-shaped-the-future","title":{"rendered":"PLATO: How an educational computer system from the \u201960s shaped the future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/plato-how-an-educational-computer-system-from-the-60s-shaped-the-future.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Bright graphics, a touchscreen, a speech synthesizer, messaging apps, games, and educational software\u2014no, it\u2019s not your kid\u2019s iPad. This is the mid-1970s, and you\u2019re using PLATO.<\/p>\n<p>Far from its comparatively primitive contemporaries of teletypes and punch cards, PLATO was something else entirely. If you were fortunate enough to be near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) around a half-century ago, you just might have gotten a chance to build the future. Many of the computing innovations we treat as commonplace started with this system, and even today, some of PLATO\u2019s capabilities have never been precisely duplicated. Today, we\u2019ll look back on this influential technological testbed and see how you can experience it now.<\/p>\n<p><b>From space race to <em>Spacewar<\/em><\/b>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bright graphics, a touchscreen, a speech synthesizer, messaging apps, games, and educational software\u2014no, it\u2019s not your kid\u2019s iPad. This is the mid-1970s, and you\u2019re using PLATO. Far from its comparatively primitive contemporaries of teletypes and punch cards, PLATO was something else entirely. If you were fortunate enough to be near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}