[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Clem Cole]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 2:46 PM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> Plato had very little if any influence on the ARPANET. I can’t say about
> the other way.

I would have expected that.  I look at the ArpaNet culture as the
MIT/CMU/Standford/BBN -- PDP-10 types if you will, which later gave way to
UNIX weenies (like me) [Not to knock or ignore what was happening in the
Central US BTW] -- i.e. basically the story from 'When Wizards Stay Up
Late.'  That certainly matched my own experiences at CMU and UCB ib
the early/mid 1970s.

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.

Likely -- great minds run on the same channel and fools think alike.




> We were the ARPANET node and saw very little of them.
>
 Interesting.  I'm assuming you read the book -- do you think he was fair
or not?  As I said, I saw Plato in one course at CMU and other than the
graphics was not really impressed one way or the other [and frankly the
Triple Drip/CMU GDP's have way better graphics - each with a dedicated
PDP-11/20].   We had mailing lists and shared resources across the ARPAnet
community so the walled garden was of little interest to me personally.  I
really can not say I learned much from Plato specifically that I would have
subconsciously wanted in UNIX, while I *can say *that both my TSS and
PDP-10 experiences (inc Assembler/BLISS/SAIL) before I learned UNIX/C had
direct influence and I openly admit I took ideas from there [e.g Ted and I
wrote fsck after seeing the disk corrector from MTS for Ted and Salvager
for TSS for me].
ᐧ