Last night, I finished reading a fascinating book by Brian Dear titled The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture.
The book covers the history of PLATO, a computer system initially designed to bring computers into the classroom back in the 1960s and 1970s. As Dear writes, the culture that came up around PLATO took the technology much farther than spelling tests and multiplication tables.
Before reading this, I had never heard of PLATO, but the truth is that it birthed many of the things we take for granted on the Internet today. PLATO is perhaps the most amazing “it was ahead of its time then it died” stories I’ve ever come across. The Friendly Orange Glow is a long read, but I was engrossed the entire time. Had history been knocked off course by just a few degrees, PLATO would have been the backbone of the early Internet, without a doubt.