[SCC_Active_Members] CDC and PLATO

[Mike Cochran]

For those SCC folk who are interested, the cyber1.org group is having  
a party this Saturday night, Aug. 20 at 6 pm, at my house near San  
Carlos/Redwood City, for the one-year anniversary of the creation of  
the cyber1.org system (really just an excuse to have a lovely August  
evening on the peninsula with about 20 interesting people and good  
wine).

Cyber1.org is a spinoff group from controlfreaks. The relationships  
are as follows: 'controlfreaks' is a loose but active international  
group of about 60 people who share a twiki and a mailing list, and  
whose goal is to preserve Control Data Corporation software,  
documentation, and to a lesser degree, hardware. Beyond just  
preserving the software for the sake of preservation, CF's are  
individually motivated to find old software because we all share  
access to a very viable emulator of old CDC mainframes (DtCyber) and  
it is fun to get the old software to work on DtCyber, which is itself  
constantly evolving. DtCyber is the center of activity for  
controlfreaks (BTW this is a direction I personally think the SCC  
should at least look into, i.e. getting more involved in emulators).  
The local bay area CF's meet about every 9 months, typically over  
beer and food in Mtn. View.

Cyber1.org is a group of people dedicated to preserving the most  
important piece of software to run on CDC machines, PLATO. PLATO was  
the first online community, and the first in too many areas to list  
here (e.g. online education,  chat (1961), email, online gaming,  
lotus notes...) Cyber1.org was started about 15 months ago and now  
has 632 members, and is a good example of a preservation-oriented  
community that only exists because of the existence of a good  
emulator. Thus cyber1.org is a successful (in hobbyist terms) spin- 
off of controlfreaks.

Currently, cyber1.org is deeply involved in obtaining old PLATO files  
and data, pulling the data off of old media, and getting it fixed and  
running on our server. There is always ongoing work on the server  
which runs 24/7.

Most recently, the SCC invited me to join their collections  
committee. Unfortunately I've not been able to attend the Wed.  
meetings due to scheduling problems. But I'm delighted to extend an  
invitation to anyone in the SCC that is either interested in becoming  
involved in CDC software preservation or just interested in seeing  
how a specialized group of hobbyists fits in to the larger picture of  
software preservation in general. Consider this an invitation to  
either a party or getting involved with CDC software preservation in  
general. Sorry about the late notice!

Anyone interested should contact/rsvp me at mfcochran at sbcglobal.net.

Mike Cochran