ANTIC Interview 465 - Vince Wu, The Learning Phone (Atari PLATO Terminal) cover art

ANTIC Interview 465 - Vince Wu, The Learning Phone (Atari PLATO Terminal)

ANTIC Interview 465 - Vince Wu, The Learning Phone (Atari PLATO Terminal)

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Vince Wu, The Learning Phone (Atari PLATO Terminal) Vince Wu worked at Atari for about two and a half years. He was the programmer of The Learning Phone, the PLATO terminal for Atari 8-bit computers. Before that, he worked with PLATO at the University of Illinois, then in California for Control Data Corporation. PLATO was the first generalized computer-assisted instruction system, a groundbreaking graphical client-server computer system aimed at education. To assist in this interview, I was joined by Thomas Cherryhomes and Michael Sternberg, who were on a road trip to a Vintage Computer Festival conference. In 2018, Tom Cherryhomes created IRATA.ONLINE, a modern working version of the PLATO server and terminals. Michael Sternberg helped reverse engineer the Atari PLATO cartridge for that project. This interview took place on September 10, 2026.

Video version of this interview

1984 "PLATO Rising" article in Antic magazine

The Learning Phone review in ANALOG Computing magazine

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ATARI PLATO Users Guide version 3.1 (1983)

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Early versions of Atari PLATO released

PLATO on Wikipedia

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