Well, I'm still trying to work out what happened to PLATO after it was purchased by company named CDC. I'm ignorant on the subject, but to speculate, perhaps they were concerned about the possible licensing issues. TSR may have sued them over games like Dungeon and DND. Or perhaps CDC just wasn't interested in publishing games. It's very hard to say.
Control Data Corporation. They were the ones who released micro PLATO and briefly sold rebranded TI-99/4a systems after Texas Instruments pulled out of the home computer market, leaving them high and dry on their premiere home platform. I think I read that CDC's attempts at commercialization were what ultimately did them in, though seeing how the market for home computers took off, you certainly couldn't blame them (meaning that the terminal/mainframe scenarios wouldn't have been sustainable anyway).
The catalog I have from CDC for their home computer products is probably indicative of why they ultimately failed commercially. A lot of the lessons were brutally overpriced. Also, it seems a lot of the CDC PLATO software I have for the TI-99/4a is proportionately hardcore education stuff, meaning lessons that you could probably expect to sell only a few hundred copies of under the most optimistic circumstances. Perhaps the strategy was to sell mostly to schools as an alternative to using terminals on the "real" system?
As for the games, yeah, it could have been anything from licensing from the original authors (I doubt copyright was an issue since these were fairly generic games and could be modified a bit anyway) to microcomputer capabilities to simply not wanting to confuse a potential buying public on what was being sold as an education system (after all, "games" could be played on the stock platform, without the need for the PLATO system).
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
(A PC Magazine Top 100 Website)
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*************************** Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
Well, I'm still trying to work out what happened to PLATO after it was purchased by company named CDC. I'm ignorant on the subject, but to speculate, perhaps they were concerned about the possible licensing issues. TSR may have sued them over games like Dungeon and DND. Or perhaps CDC just wasn't interested in publishing games. It's very hard to say.
Control Data Corporation. They were the ones who released micro PLATO and briefly sold rebranded TI-99/4a systems after Texas Instruments pulled out of the home computer market, leaving them high and dry on their premiere home platform. I think I read that CDC's attempts at commercialization were what ultimately did them in, though seeing how the market for home computers took off, you certainly couldn't blame them (meaning that the terminal/mainframe scenarios wouldn't have been sustainable anyway).
This looks like a decent history of what ultimately happened: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_talk.htm
The catalog I have from CDC for their home computer products is probably indicative of why they ultimately failed commercially. A lot of the lessons were brutally overpriced. Also, it seems a lot of the CDC PLATO software I have for the TI-99/4a is proportionately hardcore education stuff, meaning lessons that you could probably expect to sell only a few hundred copies of under the most optimistic circumstances. Perhaps the strategy was to sell mostly to schools as an alternative to using terminals on the "real" system?
As for the games, yeah, it could have been anything from licensing from the original authors (I doubt copyright was an issue since these were fairly generic games and could be modified a bit anyway) to microcomputer capabilities to simply not wanting to confuse a potential buying public on what was being sold as an education system (after all, "games" could be played on the stock platform, without the need for the PLATO system).
======================================
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
(A PC Magazine Top 100 Website)
======================================
***************************
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.