The Friendly Orange Glow

Memory lane for the cyberist.

Great job on giving the personal stories, history and culture of Plato, the foundation of our cyber world. I first touch a Plato terminal as a young USAF computer operations officer in 1976. I worked at DEC, daily using VAX Notes, NCS with NovaNet, Pearson and Plato Learning. Kudos to the author!!!!

2 people found this helpful

A very detailed computer assisted education history!

A marvelously well written account of a very early computer assisted education system. Incredibly detailed anecdotes keeps the story fresh and multiple successes and failures make it all still very relevant. A very unique book because of the depth of details from hundreds of individuals!

1 person found this helpful

Great listen for those who interacted with Plato

If you could sum up The Friendly Orange Glow in three words, what would they be?

In depth background on the Plato system and how it provided not only an educational teaching system but also a precursor to how networked users would use the system.

What did you like best about this story?

Brought back memories of going to the U of I and taking Plato courses and making the right decision after a couple of extended sessions of Airfight that one could easily get addicted to playing these multi-user games.

What about George Newbern’s performance did you like?

It is a good performance. One nit is that the University of Illinois is known as "U of I" not "UI".

Any additional comments?

There is a twit podcast called triangulation that has an interview with the author, Brian Dear. I'm thankful he wrote this book. I always wondered what the story was behind Plato.

3 people found this helpful

More than Friendly

The most powerful story, the ceation of Shanghai and the role of the Plato system in so many of today's computer scientists and software. I too was unaware of UofI and its contribution.

One of best computer history books

Well-written and well-narrated, this book describes how people evolved together with evolution of accessible computers. Do not hesitate, you will not sorry if you buy this book

A Tech History Masterpiece

This book and the audio performance of it were excellent. While the book is quite long, it is engaging. If you enjoy tech history, you will not be disappointed. it was wonderful to hear stories of tech pioneers you've never heard of before, rather than another volume of Who's Who in Silicon Valley.

Interesting, but repetitive at times

This book originally caught my eye at an airport bookstore with it's friendly orange monospaced title. As an electrical engineer interested in the origins of the technology I work with every day, I found the audiobook interesting. Having grown up in MA near MIT it was refreshing to hear about the "freshwater school" of computing.

My only gripe is that the book could have been condensed. Some anecdotes and events were rehashed throughout. I could see this being helpful if you had long breaks between reading, but since I was listening every day on my commute it just slowed down the listening experience.

One of the most interesting early computing books

Great book that covers about 50 years of computer history in broad strokes as it related to one unknown project during that time. I never had trouble picking it back up to read and intend to read again soon.