Remembering PLATO IV — www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm. Ah, memories of multi-day programming marathons at Indiana University-Purdue University at Ft. Wayne. I worked on a bulletin board program called "Pad", and would come to school Monday morning and work on it pretty solid until Wednesday evening, when I'd have a date with my girlfriend. Then I'd be back Thursday morning for another session until Friday evening. PLATO went down every day at 6AM for maintenance, so that's when I slept. Occasionally I would just fall asleep on the keyboard when the system was shutdown, waking up with square keycap indentations in my cheek. I lived on Mountain Dew, KFC chicken livers, and Camel filter cigarettes. Until then I'd only programmed in Fortran 2 and IBM 1620 assembler, and had never done a "real" software product. I learned a lot about data structures and their use, as well as user interface design and online system maintenance, with some public relations work (and advertising!) thrown in.

Pad was only in existence for a year or so. It faded away in part because I flunked out of college (too much time programming and not enough time in my electrical engineering classes), but mostly because the systems staff created PLATO Notes which was much more capable and easier on the system resources. It's gratifying to see that Pad is still remembered, if only in passing.