TECH
How do I make a terminal for this service?
The Protocol that IRATA.ONLINE uses is an ASCII based protocol developed for PLATO.
it is ASCII in that it uses 7-bit characters and does not use the 8th bit of the byte.
The protocol is completely documented in the “s0ascers” document, provided both below
and accessible using either author mode or Go in the menu system. If you wish to make
terminal software to access this service, this document is most useful.
S0ASCERS Document (HTML format)
S0ASCERS Document (ASCII text format)
Example Terminal Code
To help foster adoption of the service, alongside the protocol implementation documentation
above, and the pterm source code, also above. Steve Peltz also provided example implementations
of a classic 68K Macintosh terminal (MacPAD) and a Sun SPARC terminal (XPad), both of these
are sample implementations written in easy to understand C, that can be brought over to bootstrap
other terminal program efforts. A big thank you to Steve Peltz.
Atari PLATO Cartridge (The Learning Phone) Source Code at github.
Micro Tutor Source Code
While not needed, it is possible for PLATO terminals to receive code from IRATA and execute it locally, possibly while interacting with code running on IRATA. A Micro Tutor interpreter exists within PTerm 6.0, and thus can be used to run Micro-Tutor lessons, and with appropriate implementations on other processors (6502, 6809, 68000, etc.), Micro-TUTOR could be extended to a wide variety of retro-computing systems. Source code in assembly for the Z80 Micro-Tutor interpreter is below:
Micro-PLATO Source Code extracted from IRATA’s filesystem
Complete Level-2 Micro-TUTOR source code
The core interpreter for Micro-TUTOR level 4
How do I write software for this service?
IRATA.ONLINE like all PLATO systems, utilizes the TUTOR language for the majority of its
programs and lessons. It is a very simple language to learn, and is designed to leverage
the unique aspects of the service. The editor, debugger, and visual editors needed to make
excellent programs for this service, are all built in, and available to users that ask for
an Author sign-on.
There is also the =0introtut= lesson available from the Help menu and in
author mode, as well as the =aids= lesson, which serves as a reference guide.
In addition, the fine folks at bitsavers.org and control-data.info provided a copy of
The Tutor Language in PDF format, so you can teach yourself TUTOR quickly!
