SidesWays Blog

At work today we discussed the need for a relatively sophisticated permissions system for controlling access to various features at a site we are building. I realized that something similar to what we were talking about was designed and built way back in the early 1980s on the PLATO system. Here's an Antiques Roadshow tour of PLATO Access Lists using a game I worked on in college as an example.... (if you want the PDF version contact me ). Avatar: A Multi-Player Dungeons and Dragons Game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(PLATO_system_video_game) An Access List is a system-provided capability on PLATO that allows authors (developers) to create custom flags that can then be used to control access to various features of a lesson (program). The example shown here is for Avatar, a popular RPG on PLATO. Keep in mind that this was created in the early 1980s and 512 x 512 plasma (orange) panel screens were state-of-the-art at the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_...

I was fortunate to have worked my way through college as an Undergraduate Research Assistant with the Economics department at the University of Illinois working on multi-player bargaining experiments funded by some NSF grants where one of the researchers was Al Roth. He was already well known in game theory at the time these experiments were conducted. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2012 was awarded jointly to Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2012/ Three of his earlier papers where we (Ron Harstad, Michael Barr, myself) contributed by building multi-player experiments on PLATO: Expectations and Reputations in Bargaining: An Experimental Study (1983) https://web.stanford.edu/~alroth/papers/1983_AER_Expectations_and_Reputations.pdf The Role of Information in Bargaining: An Experime...