[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[John Day]

Yea, I would say that Englebart’s NLS had more influence on us and the people at PARC. We had TNLS running over the ’Net at Illinois. Many of Englebart’s group ended up at PARC.  With graphics, Ivan Sutherland and Newman and Sproul were probably get biggest influence. We weren’t doing a lot of fancy stuff, although I remember Knowles coming up with a pretty nifty hidden line algorithm.

As for chat-like programs, TENEX had the ability to share screens and in 1970 or 71, Jim Calvin, either just before he left Case-Western or just after he got to BBN, ‘extended’ it as a multi-user ’teleconferencing’ program. That *was* a social media. Most of us had terminals at home and we would spend hours in the evenings discussing the problems of the world, collaborating on code, etc. Someone wrote articles on it and demonstrated it at ICCC ’72.  Most of those applications were invented several times.

It is not uncommon in the history of technology (it has been observed back several centuries) that it isn’t so much direct transfer of technology but more someone brings back a story along the lines of, ‘I saw this thing that did thus and so and kind of looks like t.’ Which gives someone the idea, that if it exists, then how it must work like this.’ It isn’t quite independent invention, but it isn’t quite direct influence either.

John

> On Aug 23, 2021, at 09:34, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> below...
> 
> On Sun, Aug 22, 2021 at 11:35 PM Brian Dear via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto: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