[ih] Fwd: How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Bob Purvy]

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.
> >> --
> >> Internet-history mailing list
> >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >
>
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