Show Summary: Before Facebook, before Apple – before even the Web itself – a small group of researchers and students created a digital community that’s all but forgotten. Created as an educational tool, the PLATO system – like the internet decades later – broke out of its prescribed limits and took on its own life. Messaging communities, computer games, even online social protest have their roots in this handful of monitors casting their “friendly orange glow” on the faces of this select few. Brian Dear interviewed dozens of them to get this special chapter of modern history in writing before it blinked out of memory.