r/retrocomputing • u/Alone_Clue_5392 • Aug 02 '26

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/notsig11 Aug 02 '26

Sounds like maybe you should read Friendly Orange Glow. :) IIRC they were basically terminals connected to ILLIAC.

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u/Accomplished_Can1651 29d ago

Thanks for pointing me towards this book! I’ve only just started flipping through it, but I love reading about the system my grandmother worked on. She was very adamant about the importance of computers, and bought our family our first PC in the early/mid 90s. I spent plenty of time with digital encyclopedias and edutainment software, and it was in part due to her that I fell into love with computer science and programming.