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jcrash

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Uncut Currency 2 years ago

I would love a source for this if you could find one. I tried searching and will search more in depth later. Any more keywords or information you remember about the story?

The locations of the two sites— .... Sunnyvale, Calif., .... Albany, N.Y. ...... The location of the third planned center ..... is still a matter of speculation.

Why would you add a 'saved you a click' comment and then literally post BS?

I was going to share this story but you beat me to it. They're still claiming this in tours ~2017.

The building was called the Foreign Languages Building until very recently and is now called the Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics Building.

Relevant info from the UIHistory site:

"Located on the site of the former Old Entomology Building, ground was broken on the Foreign Language Building (FLB) on December 18, 1968.

A popular myth is that the building's distinctive architecture was a result of its being designed to house a supercomputer on campus called Plato. The building was supposedly designed so that if it was bombed, the building's shell would fall outwards, protecting the supercomputer on the inside. It is also rumored that the building's interior layout was a result of trying to confuse Soviet spies and prevent them from stealing secrets from the supercomputer.

In reality, the building's architecture is not actually all that unique and was a popular style of the day. In fact, just a few blocks to the west, one may find the Speech and Hearing Sciences Building, which a 2-story clone of the building. Plato itself was real, but refered not to a secret government program, but rather to the first "modern" electronic learning system, the forbearer of course software like WebCT and Mallard. The mainframe computer that ran the Plato system was located in north campus, in a building which used to reside on the west side of the Bardeen Quad." [0]

[0] https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam...

Hilarious that the myth extends to the interior design - the basement really is a maze the first few times you visit.