[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[vinton cerf]

i thought the hidden line algorithm was done by John Warnock while at
University of Utah?

v


On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 10:12 AM John Day via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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