Since the US population has increased some 40% since 1975, if the number of children available for adoption has stayed the same, then we are making progress.
I used PLATO (and programmed a few lessons) at the U of Delaware in the 80s. By the time the WWW rolled around in the 90s, I was amused to see people hailing IM, forums, blogs, etc. as revolutionary new tools — we had them on PLATO years earlier.
My fondest memories of PLATO were reading “Dr. Graper”’s humorous posts (http://www.grapenotes.com/).
“Vegetable”?