How I have ended up in the labyrinths of PLATO

PLATO was a computer system that originated in the late 1950s out of the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex. The idea was to construct 'computer-teachers' to educate the increasingly literate masses, the method was networked computer terminals, and the cash came from "combined Army-Navy-Air Force funding." In the 1960s PLATO was spun-off into the University of Illinois where re-written into an open-source TUTOR language and then promoted with evangelical (and eventually commercial) enthusiasm.

Each PLATO network was its own sysop fiefdom but they were also linked together county-wide as a result some Americans got to experience a 'mini-internet' in the 1970s and 1980s through these machines. It was mostly university students but also high-schools, community clubs, corporations, military and even prisoners who could take computerized education lessons, emails, bulletin boards, touch screens, early multimedia stuff like synthesizers and, importantly, games - both solo and multiplayer.

In the early 2000s a volunteer group was donated a copy of the physical 9-track tapes of the PLATO operating system and using a terminal emulator you can access it. I signed up two weeks ago because I wanted to find the first D&D computer games and PLATO is where they were created.


The very first D&D books (those famous 'brown box' of 3 booklets) were published in 1974 and the first PLATO D&D program was made the same year. Pencil D&D and Computer D&D are inseparable. I'm sure other early computers ran similar d&d programs because D&D is a fantasy war-game simulation and every arena of simulations rejoiced at the invention of computers. Wargame's complex statistic, rules and calculations were awaiting to be inputted as code. Look at the 'stat-block' beside every illustration in Monster Manual (1978), it looks like a primitive computer language.

Those original D&D booklets would inspire people to try and code D&D. Some wanted to reduce the bookkeeping load, some wanted to create random dungeons that allow them to be surprised by their own creations, some wanted to create puzzles for others to solve. All of them used the basic D&D monsters.


The addictive power of those first games is startling. People broke into labs, hide in libraries, flunked out and even bribed people for access (or simply to acquire a powerful character, item or empire in a game - this is apparently a long tradition).  The first 1974 D&D program was deleted by a sysop because its popularity took so much processing and memory, but the genie was not about to go back in the bottle. PLATO's caverns would be underworld for the first generation of computer D&D games (some of them multiplayer).  

Trying to sort out the lineages of these games resembles differentiating strains of bacteria, as games are cloned, edited, revised, translated, deleted, and even printed-out and typed back in.  There are stories of people coding d&d programs on other early computers - some would print out a page showing where you were in a dungeon every time you took a step - but PLATOs' are the only ones to survive to this day.

The nomenclature of these PLATO games is tricky because we are dealing with file names like 'dnd5', 'dnd8', 'pedit5', but the next round of names is the far more florid being Tolkien (Moria, Orthac) and French (Oubliette) inspired. These popular files will migrate across PLATO fiefdoms becoming part of the basic package and eventually they will immigrate into DOS and BASIC to create classics like Telengard and Wizardy.

As the 1980s progressed personal computers made PLATO obsolete but for many those strange terminals were their first glimpse of computer gaming's potential. Here is an early Dragon Magazine column from September 1980:

It had to happen. Hobby computer freaks have been inventing and playing games with their computers for years. The home computer industry is growing at a phenomenal rate, and the price of microcomputers is dropping [...]Computer gaming, and the inevitable computer hobby that comes with it, is not just a habit; it
is better described as a rampant (benevolent) disease, raging across the country. The microcomputer will take the garbage out of gaming, and leave the fun to us humans.

My first real bout with computer gaming came some years back while I was a minion of the State of Illinois. At work there were 8 PLATO terminals, which sat idle all night long . . . until I came along.
(PLATO is a gigantic, monstrous, worldwide, educational computer.) Everything was there. Chess programs, Scrabble, Monopoly, Dungeons, Tank Battles, Star Treks, Basketball, Football and much
much more. Players participated from terminals all over the world. My favorite game was an enormous, never-ending, galactic battle, that handled 50+ players, all piloting sophisticated star ships that
would put the Enterprise to shame. And it’s still going on. For a spare five grand or so you or I could get a terminal.
[AH meets the Computer - Dragon #41]

The primordial PLATO digital dungeons were explored in both first person and top-view views. The graphics were a step above late 'rogue-like' games that could only use ASCII characters because of the unique design of PLATO monitors. The setting of the dungeons was D&D as the programmers were playing D&D by day and coding at night - with a touch of Tolkien due to the on-going 'Hobbit revival' occurring on many campuses. Soon even non-D&D players were hooked and began coding their own version. The ethic of early D&D was definitely 'roll your own' as it heard memorably described by an early game designer.

I only briefly played these first games (but if anyone wants to join up and do a multiplayer one I'd be interested) instead I was able to reading their hefty 'helpfiles' to find out all I want to know about their monsters, classes and spells. This ground zero for what will become Ultima, Final Fantasy, WoW, Skyrim ect...


The best part is that the emulator is proving to be a fascinating 'game' in itself.

I have to use weird keys (shift+F10 just to login!), figure out weird commands, and slowly make my way deeper and deeper into the system. There is plenty to explore: games, teaching lessons, bulletin boards, helpfiles. By reading these dusty tomes I discovered that hitting a+F8 (yes, the letter 'a') on a bulletin board lets you see its' archive - so now I'm reading posts from the early 1980s - it's like the thrill of finding a hidden treasure chest packed full of magic scroll. Another thread revealed that PLATO was used by the CIA and NSA back in the day - Ah-ha! 'Forbidden knowledge' almost as good as a demonological treatise bound in dwarf-skin!


Perhaps this another reason D&D and programming went together so well: the typical quest through a branching, layered dungeon - defeating bugs, mazes, logic problems and finding hidden rooms - until you get scrolls of Ultimate Power does share some similarity with hacking and programming as you go deeper and deeper until you get the source code (or advance to the level of 'sys-op', or find the room called 'root').

So this is a little glimpse of the strange dungeons and hidden archives my quest into the early days of D&D has taken me. And I will be given reports back until the grey skies cover the land and the wendigos return again...



[I'd be remiss as a philosopher if I didn't mention that Plato's Cave is one of the oldest and greatest allegories for how human get caught in false realities. I made a 're-mix' of it to apply to how the media works so I could use it in my Media Ethics class. Perhaps when I'm feeling more poetic I'll try to try the concepts of Plato & PLATO together]

i had never heard of PLATO and I am surprized at the complexity it had given its age. So you are using an emulator to go on to a PLATO server?

I had to re-write portions of that article because I'm still unclear on the technical aspects. Basically I use a 'terminal emulator' to connect with an (also emulated?) PLATO mainframe/server. Once there I have to log-in and then I can explore the strange passages and hidden rooms of PLATO as I wish.

As I wrote the PLATO 'server' I'm exploring has archives that go back to the early 1980s(!) so it must be a copy of an actual server. There seemed to have been a few PLATO servers as different versions were created.