[ih] Fwd: How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Jack Haverty]

I've had a similar experience as John.  In my time at MIT and BBN 
through the 60s/70s, I don't recall ever hearing anything about Plato, 
so it's not likely it had much influence in our work on ARPANET/Internet.

IIRC, playing around with all sorts of graphics-capable terminals was 
popular back then - in the late 60s onward.   E.g., I had a student-job 
to create a graphical mechanical engineering simulation, and help the ME 
students do their designs, all using CTSS and an "ARDS" (Advanced Remote 
Display Station).  In another group at MIT, we had an Evans&Sutherland 
display, circa early 70s.  People at another lab were playing with 
systems that used light pens.  In the later 70s, at BBN, we had a 3D 
display that could show wire-frame models of stuff, and let you rotate 
and manipulate it.

AFAIK, few if any of these had much obvious influence outside their own 
communities.   Although they all had interesting technology, there were 
too few of them available for use as everyday terminals to your favorite 
computer system.   So they were good for demos, but not for mainstream work.

At MIT, we somehow managed to get a bunch of Imlacs and they became 
everyday terminals, with impressive (for the time) graphics capability.  
We tried to use these via the ARPANET for graphics, circa 1975 or so.  
(Specifically, we tried to get the "Maze War" multi-player game to run 
over the ARPANET)   It worked functionally, but the ARPANET game 
experience was just too slow for the game to be viable.  Network players 
didn't have a chance.

It's hard to say how any of those early graphics influenced later work 
on the 'net.  I can however attest to the influence on me of that "Maze" 
game experience and its subsequent influence on the network.  That 
experience made me very aware of the issue of latency, and the 
desirability of a network being able to handle different kinds of 
traffic flows with different needs of bandwidth and latency.   So I 
argued strongly for the inclusion of basic mechanisms, for 
experimentation, into the new version of TCP/IP -- what became the TOS 
bits in the IP header for version 4.   The network needed to be able to 
handle different types of traffic in different ways.  (Sadly, it seems 
that capability never matured as the network grew; interactive gaming is 
still problematic today)

I'm sure other people had similar experiences with whatever graphics 
systems were available to them.   So any such system might have 
influenced later work in the network arena.   But I think you'd have to 
trace from the experience of individuals to find out what effect any 
particular early system had downstream.   Just because something existed 
doesn't mean others knew about it.   We didn't even have email back 
then...and the web, zoom, et al were at best science fiction.

/Jack Haverty


On 6/10/21 11:47 AM, John Day via Internet-history 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