[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Clem Cole]

below...

On Sun, Aug 22, 2021 at 11:35 PM Brian Dear via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> live 2-way instant messaging in character-by-character typed chat, which
> Unix people later implemented as “talk”
>
I'm in an interesting position here because I started this thread and I am
author the author of Unix talk [and also person responsible for the horrid
error sending the rendezvous information in vax native order, not network
order].

As I said in my original email, I played with Plato, most games and
graphics as an undergrad; but I had access the PDP-10's, the GPD2 -
Graphics Wonders, the ARPAnet and UNIX which had a much higher influence on
me.  I think Brian is right, that some people like Ray Ozzie,have said
Plato had a profound influence on them.   I do think that people that saw
some of the features of Plato, remembered them when they did other systems.

What I took from my limited Plato use, was how simple graphics could be
more easily integrated.  The GDPs were (are awesome) but took an PDP-11/20
to drive them and a lot of programming. I was also introduced to PLOT10 on
the IBM S/360 running TSS, as it turns out before I saw the GDPs.   Later I
would have two of the 'Killer-Bs' [Kelly Booth and John Beatty] as
officemates at Tektronix Labs, which very much polished that thinking about
graphics, when we did the Magnolia
<http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/tektronix/magnolia/> workstation.
But without a doubt, an early experience trying to write a 'program' to
draw on the screen was with Plato, which I found easier than trying to do
something similar in FORTRAN and PLOT-10.

That said, Brian, I never saw or used the PLATO 2-way chat scheme, so it *did
not have any* effect on me when I wrote talk(1).  The UNIX program was born
from need.  Many of us hated walking up the hill from our apts more than
once a day [Cory and Evan's hall are about ½ way up the Berkeley hills --
most cheap grad apts were in 'down the hill' nearing Berkeley's downtown or
Emeryville].   As grad students, we could only afford a single phone line
at home, so talk(1) was created so I could ask one of my officemates to
mount a mag tape or reboot a hung system in the UCB CAD lab, without having
to hang up the phone line.  We had the Unix write(1) that I think Ken wrote
originally.   That certainly was an influence, and I wanted something a
little more interactive.  Peter Moore suggested (and built) the split
screen idea using the curses library, as the original version has been
line-by-line, more like write(1); which the sources to it, I do not think
left the CAD machines.   Sam Leffler got it from me for the 4.1a release.

Talk was developed not as a social thing, it was convience to allow us to
do work in the evening.  Which I think is different from what Brian
describes in his book.   Yes, it might have later been used for that also,
but Plato did not have any influence.

Clem Cole
ᐧ