[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Bob Purvy]

I will. I was a DCL rat, and we'd just occasionally meet people from PLATO,
but that was it.

I had a friend who took Latin and they used PLATO. I also used it in a
Psych 100 experiment. And that's the extent of my contact.

On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 1:30 PM Brian Dear <brian at platohistory.org> wrote:

> 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  (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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