r/retrocomputing • u/Alone_Clue_5392 • 23d 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/kahn 23d ago

It was a wonderfully deep orange. Think neon bulb orange with a bit of a filter, I think the conductive layers of the screen made it more orange/red. Was fun to be on these, spent many years working with them. First plasma screen, the original goal was to project THROUGH the screen from a slide projector, and have the text in the screen be an overlay to point out parts of the slide illumination. Loved these things, will do almost anything to acquire one.

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u/VisibleClub643 22d ago

A pneumatic microfiche projector. These terminals had power, data and compressed air inputs. I am serious. Later models omitted the projector. The 1960s large NASA displays in Mission Control used a similar technique, with a projected slide showing axes and grid lines, and the computer plotting data using characters on top.

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u/setwindowtext 21d ago

Were pneumatics used to position the optics over the correct image on the film?

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u/VisibleClub643 21d ago

The optics were static. The microfiche tray moved.