We here at Libretro/RetroArch encourage the promotion of innovative grass-roots retro gaming efforts, and we thought it would be remiss of us not to bring to your attention this particular project, IRATA.ONLINE, ran by Thom Cherryhomes (System Operator). He has made many contributions and submissions to Libretro cores and RetroArch in general, and now he has embarked on an innovative new project that should prove interesting to people interested in the early days of home computing.

If you’d like to read the full article, check out the PDF article here. Also check out the Youtube video linked above. If you’d like to meet with the author on Twitter, you can reach him here.

What is IRATA.ONLINE?

IRATA.ONLINE is an on-line service aimed at all of the various retro-computing communities. It takes the recently released implementation of PLATO that the CYBER1.ORG community provided to the public, and attempts to build a complete community infrastructure around it so that vintage computer users can have something truly unique, and compelling, to connect to.

It all began with PLATO.

IRATA.ONLINE’s roots, are in the legendary PLATO system. PLATO, which stood for Programmed Logic And Teaching Operations, provided a time sharing system originally chartered to investigate the potential for computers within the context of education, but the system and the community which grew up around it, proved to be so innovative, and resourceful, that it not only encompassed the cutting edge of education, but grew to create many firsts in social networking and on-line gaming, as well as providing a blue-print for collaborative software development through its built-in development environment.

PLATO started, at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, in 1962, initially hosting two terminals on the ILLIAC-I computer system, before scaling upward to more terminals, better display technologies, and ever faster computers from Control Data Corporation. It reached its peak in the late 1970s, with many thousands of custom made plasma flat-screen, touch screen terminals connected to Control Data CYBER super-computer hardware, providing graphically intensive multi-user full screen interactive content, very rare for the time, when most time-sharing systems were still operated by teleprinters, and video terminals (and dedicated video displays) were extremely rare.

Necessity and the Mother of Invention.

I mentioned the flat plasma panel display, in passing, but it is a fantastic example of the cutting edge ingenuity possessed by the PLATO team. One must understand, that to create a graphical bit-mapped display requires memory, and in the mid 1960s, memory averaged a cost of $4 a bit, not gigabyte, megabyte, kilobyte, or even byte, bit. This meant that the traditional mechanism for providing the needed memory for a graphical display would have made the video terminal itself prohibitively expensive. The solution was to create an entirely new display technology, which would not need to constantly be refreshed; once a gas plasma display has a pixel enabled, it stays enabled without further assistance, effectively merging the display and its memory into one cost effective package, and making full screen interactive graphics possible on a per -dot basis, and without the drawbacks of a vector display. While most displays today now use liquid crystals, the modern plasma television and monitor displays descend directly from this technology.

Through PLATO’s history, you can trace the beginnings of many of the things we take for granted today all in full use by the mid 1970s: