[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 24-Aug-21 06:46, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 8:12 AM John Day via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
> Related comment -- from my various interactions with historians about
> technology history.  If the available technology is limited (as it was in
> the 1950s/60s/70s and early 1980s in many dimensions) then your solutions
> to certain problems are going to look rather similar.  That doesn't meant
> that two similar solutions influenced each other... The trick in writing
> tech history is figuring out where there was a choice space and where there
> wasn't (much of) one.

Absolutely. It goes back to the 1940s, in fact, if not to the Jacquard loom
There's a reason I co-wrote a book chapter called "Turing's Zeitgeist."
(ISBN 9780198747826, pre-print at
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/TuringZeitgeistPreprint.pdf .)

Incidentally, re the subject line of this thread, I used to annoy Tim
Berners-Lee by telling him that the web was "the fluff on top of the
Internet". I think this discussion has confused matters a bit, because
that's what PLATO presumably influenced, not the infrastructure.

Regards
   Brian Carpenter