[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

Sat Aug 21 06:25:12 PDT 2021

Yea, the display technology was interesting but otherwise it was just another timesharing system, and really not all that great of one. Here is part of what I sent them last night off-list. I didn’t think others would be interested. I have said it here before:

To refresh others:  Our group was the ARPANET node at Illinois and developed 3 OSs from scratch. One proven secure, and one which experimented fairly deeply with the leverage of an extensible OS language, in addition to the what is recounted here. Pete Alsberg became the manager of the group at one point (slightly tweaked):

> Around 75, Alsberg was teaching an OS class at DCL. One of the Plato guys was taking the course. They were in the process of building the new Plato OS. They did a computation in class and predicted that the system would top out at so many terminals. (Well, below their target.) Soon after that, Alsberg was at a party with the guy in charge of the system development. (The name is on the tip of my tongue, I can see his face. Remind me of a few names, it wasn’t Bitzer, Finally came to me. (Weird) It was Paul Tenszar (sp? that doesn’t look right) ). The guy got a funny look on his face. They had hit the limit that day and it was within one or two terminals of the prediction.
> 
> As I said earlier, we put the first Unix on the ’Net in the summer of ’75. Got a few of the Plato terminals. Stripped down Unix to fit on an LSI-11, added touch to the screen. all on a short cabinet that so you could sit at and use it. Hooked up to NARIS the land-use planning system for the 6 counties around Chicago as an ‘intelligent terminal.’ You could do maps down to the square mile with different patterns for use, the usual graphs, etc. all without a keyboard. (it had a keyboard but it was only needed for data entry.) We also installed a few of the terminals with different application in DC (Reston), at CINCPAC in Hawaii, and possible a few others I don’t remember. While we were doing that, we also added non-blocking IPC to UNIX. All it had was pipes. NARIS was a distributed database application that used databases on both coasts and we used the ARPANET. We did a fair amount of distributed database research in that period as well and worked out the issues of network partition, which as near as I can tell are still not clearly understood.
> 
> I am afraid we just didn’t see Plato as all that interesting, a traditional mainframe and terminals system. And they pretty well kept to themselves. We were probably both wrong.

Take care,
John

The reason I remember the one at CINCPAC was that one of the stories that got back was, that they had been invited to an evening at the CINC’s home. The next Saturday morning our guy showed up at CINCPAC in a T-shirt and shorts to work on the installation. The guard was giving him grief, when the CINC strode in. Greeted our guy with a friendly remark about the gathering a few nights before and headed on in. The following conversation ensued: The guard a bit uncomfortable: You know the CINC? Yup. You know him pretty well? Yup. Errr, I guess it would be okay.  ;-) And our guy was able to get to work.

> On Aug 21, 2021, at 07:58, Vint Cerf via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> I worked on ARPANET from 1968-1972 and then started on Internet in 1973. I
> joined ARPA in 1976 and stayed there working on Internet until end of 1982.
> I visited the campus, met with Don Bitzer in the late 1960s (hazy memory),
> was impressed by the display technology, but, honestly, do not recall much
> influence on the Internet work. It was certainly an example of time-shared
> application that could be expanded by way of networks like ARPANET and
> Internet but I don't recall direct influence on, e.g., protocol
> development, packet switch design, application layer protocols.
> 
> v
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 4:35 PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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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>>> 
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> 
> 
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