Thread View: alt.folklore.computers
2 messages
2 total messages
Started by jo... Douglas W. Jones201H MLH31...
Thu, 25 Jan 1990 16:57
The Great Guano Gap
Author: jo... Douglas W. Jones201H MLH31...
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1990 16:57
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1990 16:57
24 lines
1412 bytes
1412 bytes
Once upon a time, back in 1973 or 1974? Bruce Parello's on-line newspaper
"Newsreport" on the Plato system ran a serialization of a work of fiction
called "The Great Guano Gap."
Does anyone know if an on-line copy was ever extracted from Plato and made
available anywhere else? Does it still exist on Plato?
The story line involved some junior system programmers on the Plato system
who started getting e-mail and talk sessions from very strange places,
including:
supreme-being of p
(the suffix "of p" was Plato-ese for part-time system staff)
kissenger of state
and various people in Bosnia-Hersogovenia, Tibet and elsewhere.
Hard-copy would be worthless, as the story was presented as a series of
terminal sessions, with talk windows popping up, and realistic human typing
speeds for the dialogue (except supreme being of p of course, he (or she?)
could type at 1200 baud).
Doug Jones
jo...@herky.cs.uiowa.edu
Re: The Great Guano Gap
Author: cs1...
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1990 01:40
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1990 01:40
13 lines
954 bytes
954 bytes
The Great Guano Gap does indeed still exist, at least on the "cerl" system at the University of Illinois. The source code (in TUTOR, the PLATO programming language) is open to inspection on the system. Michael Pereckas Internet: m-per...@uiuc.edu PLATO: m pereckas / imsa89 / cerl CI$: 72311,3246
Thread Navigation
This is a paginated view of messages in the thread with full content displayed inline.
Messages are displayed in chronological order, with the original post highlighted in green.
Use pagination controls to navigate through all messages in large threads.
Back to All Threads