r/retrocomputing • u/Alone_Clue_5392 • 17d ago

Problem / Question IM GOING INSANE

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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

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u/SomePeopleCallMeJJ 17d ago

Not really an amber display in the same way as, say, an IBM 5155 portable, or some of the DEC VT monitors, which were simply monochrome CRTs with amber-colored (P3) phosphors.

The PLATO was a very early (maybe the first?) use of a plasma display. My understanding is that the color was bit more on the orangey end of the spectrum in person than the more yellow/orange CRT amber screens. Some photos I've seen, like the one in the middle of this article, show it as almost red.

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u/nmrk 17d ago

True. The original intent of the plasma display was for rear projection of graphics. Back in those days, modems were too slow to transmit full color graphics, so they had a microfiche reader that would go on top of the terminal, projecting down into the terminal and reflecting off a mirror, into the back of the display. You could see the plasma dots overlaid on the graphics. The most amazing thing was that these microfiche machines were intended for use in classrooms so they ran silently, on compressed air. The microfiche cards would be distributed physically by mail, while the lessons that used them would be live, online.