[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Brian Dear]

Bob,

Might I suggest, if you’re curious about PLATO, you rely on a more in-depth history, available in my book The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture (Pantheon, 2017) [1] which that 33-minute podcast episode seems to be a hodgepodge summary of. In the real deal, my book, you might find a more engaging exploration of the historical, technological, business, and societal influences of PLATO and why it’s important.

Regarding your being at U of I at the same time: if you were an undergrad from say 64-68, there’s a very good chance you would not have come across PLATO which was still in its formative stages and not deployed widely at all on campus. Things started scaling significantly around 1972 with the launch of the CDC CYBER mainframe-based system that grew to over 1000 terminals, all over campus. However, if you were working on a Master’s degree within the ivory tower of the CS dept from 68-73, a dept that with few exceptions looked down upon PLATO as a silly toy not worthy of even brief curiosity, it’s possible you still would have overlooked it. Even though DCL was very close the CERL lab on Mathews Ave.

Anyway, check out the book—it’s all about the Illinois story, as well as the influence (in both directions) between the PLATO project and the Xerox PARC Alto/SmallTalk/Dynabook projects.

- Brian

[1] http://amzn.to/2ol9Lu6 <http://amzn.to/2ol9Lu6>  (Amazon link for the book)



> On Jul 5, 2021, at 6:06 PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> I just listened to the episode
> <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-computing/id1472463802?i=1000511301793>
> about
> PLATO on The History of Computing podcast, mostly because I'm being
> interviewed for it tomorrow on my book
> <https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Future-Albert-Cory/dp/1736298615/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=>
> .
> 
> I know we've covered this before, but I think the "influence" of PLATO is a
> bit overstated. I hesitate to be too dogmatic about that, but after all,
> you would think I'd have heard more about it, being at the U of I at the
> same time as he's talking about here. Maybe it had more influence at *other*
> sites?
> 
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 11:48 AM John Day via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> Forgot reply-all.
>> 
>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>> 
>>> From: John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net>
>>> Subject: Re: [ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet
>>> Date: June 10, 2021 at 14:46:35 EDT
>>> To: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
>>> 
>>> Plato had very little if any influence on the ARPANET. I can’t say about
>> the other way.  We were the ARPANET node and saw very little of them. We
>> were in different buildings on the engineering campus a couple of blocks
>> from each other, neither of which was the CS building. This is probably a
>> case of people looking at similar problems and coming to similar
>> conclusions, or from the authors point of view, doing the same thing in
>> totally different ways.
>>> 
>>> I do remember once when the leader of our group, Pete Alsberg, was
>> teaching an OS class and someone from Plato was taking it and brought up
>> what they were doing for the next major system release. In class, they did
>> a back of the envelope calculation of when the design would hit the wall.
>> That weekend at a party, (Champaign-Urbana isn’t that big) Pete found
>> himself talking to Bitzer and related the story from the class. Bitzer got
>> kind of embarrassed and it turned out they had hit the wall a couple of
>> days before as the class’ estimate predicted.  ;-) Other than having
>> screens we could use, we didn’t put much stock in their work.
>>> 
>>> (The wikipedia page on Plato says it was first used Illiac I. It may be
>> true, but it must not have done much because Illiac I had 40 bit words with
>> 1K main memory on Willams tubes and about 12K on drum. Illiac I ( and II
>> and III) were asynchronous hardware.)
>>> 
>>> As Ryoko always said, I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
>>> 
>>> John
>>> 
>>>> On Jun 10, 2021, at 11:48, Clem Cole via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> FWIW: Since Plato was just brought up, I'll point a vector to some
>> folks.
>>>> If you read Dear's book, it tends to credit the walled garden' system
>>>> Plato with a lot of the things the Internet would eventually be known.
>> How
>>>> much truth there is, I can not say.  But there is a lot of good stuff in
>>>> here and it really did impact a lot of us as we certainly had seen that
>>>> scheme, when we started to do things later.
>>>> 
>>>> So ... if  you have not yet read it, see if you can get a copy of Brian
>>>> Dear's *The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System
>> and
>>>> the Dawn of Cyberculture* ISBN-10 1101871555
>>>> 
>>>> In my own case, Plato was used for some Physics courses and I
>>>> personally never was one of the 'Plato ga-ga' type folks, although I did
>>>> take on course using it and thought the graphics were pretty slick.
>> But, I
>>>> had all the computing power I needed with full ARPANET access between
>> the
>>>> Computer Center and CMU's EE and CS Depts.  But I do have friends that
>> were
>>>> Physics, Chem E, and Mat Sci that all thought it was amazing and liked
>> it
>>>> much better than the required FORTRAN course they had to take using TSS
>> on
>>>> the IBM 360/67.
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>>> 
>> 
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