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What is a PLATO Terminal Emulator and why do I need one?You will need to download and install a program to get on Cyber1. We call this program Pterm. The original PLATO terminals were of several types, a "dumb" terminal by Magnavox (commonly called a Maggie) which had the orange gas plasma display, a more advanced terminal called the Plato V (also called a PPT), the Information System Terminal (IST) series (IST-I, II, and III) that used a black and white CRT, and the CDC 721 (also called a Viking) that was also a CRT but with a slow green phosphor display. These are not the only terminals that were used to access PLATO, but they are the most common of the original equipment. Our terminal emulator is based on the model of the Plato V (PPT), and includes emulation of the Intel 8080 micro-processor. We also support a hybrid color terminal which could be considered to be a color Plato V. Color is only available under the ASCII port 8005 when connecting, but it achieves faster perceived output due to buffering design at the mainframe. Apple Macintosh OS XVersion 4.17 is a disk image, so just download the file and click on it. One potential problem is that Expose uses F9 and F10 (data and stop on PLATO). You can easily remap the keys used in Expose by going into 'System Preferences" and then clicking the Expose icon. Microsoft WindowsDownload pterm v4.17 installer. Run the installer and follow the instructions. Report problems in the notesfile 'ptermdev' on the system. If you cannot connect, check firewall settings. Typical routers will permit outbound connections, but the default settings on some software firewalls do restrict outgoing traffic on unknown ports. So check ports 5004 and 8005 (color mode). Unix (including Linux)You have various options which we will call A through E: A. Here is a b2zipped tarball of v4.16 containing an executable pterm built on redhat 9 for redhat 9 or higher. B. Here is an rpm of pterm v4.16 for i386 built on redhat 9 for redhat 9 or higher, including fedora.. C. Here is an executable pterm v1.23 made on redhat 8 (a pretty old glibc). Make the file executable with the command chmod a+x pterm D. If you prefer, you can also compile the latest pterm source (for linux, unix, etc.) yourself:
E. If that doesn't work, you can check for an uploaded executable pterm that fits your system from down below. Make sure that X is running. Note that pterm also accepts arguments such as ip address and port number, although doing so is not necessary. For example, from the command line you could type "pterm cyberserv.org" or "pterm x.x.x.x" (where x.x.x.x is an IP address known to connect to Cyber1 - we discourage IP address usage as this could change someday). Cross-Platform (Java)This is a beta: Java Pterm v0.5. You will need the java runtime environment if you don't already have it installed. Member Contributed BuildsIf you downloaded the source for pterm, have successfully compiled and tested the executable, and it is not already listed in the installation section above, by all means please contact us to arrange an upload. Let us know exactly what OS and what hardware platform you built it on, and whether or not you are open to being emailed by a small number of potential users of your executable. No OS/hardware combo is too exotic for us.
pterm for Sun Sparc, built on Solaris 9 with gcc-3.2.3, donated by Dave Dennis (dmd/cerl) |