@labrador
10d
I stumbled on this book in the Menlo Park public library and really enjoyed it. I also wondered why I had never heard of PLATO. Very good read.
@felixgallo
10d
Friendly Orange Glow is unfortunately kind of overstuffed, meandering and political and focused excessively on bitzer, and misses so much of what PLATO/NovaNET were to so many people. Empire, avatar, oubliette, dnd, even moonwar, typomatic, Room B/C, night ops, pso, AIDS, TERM-test, cherry keyboard hoarding, stig bjorklund, the chem lab, the trs-80 running the satellite, lippold haken and the music room, bigfoot. I don't know if it's possible to write the PLATO story but FOG only skips across the surface.
@disqard
9d
Also interesting: a write-up of the second-ever TED conference (in 1990!) by Brian Dear!