[ih] Fwd: How Plato Influenced the Internet

Thu Jun 10 13:23:31 PDT 2021

Hah & thanks. History of the network wrt. latency and gaming. Fun topic.

Games without a competitive real-time element worked best
over early WANs. Such as round based strategy games. We always played in the
late 80th/early 90th Xconq between multiple universities interconnected with
64kbps WAN links. That of course was a complete waste of bandwidth given how
Xconq is s single game engine with every player just being a remote Xdisplay
and hence running the really not bandwidth optimized Xwindows rendering
protocol across the WAN. Worked great until more users started to share
the 64kbps links. At which point i actually had to figure out how to QoS
prioritize TCP port 6000 on the WAN "routers".  But that of course was
more bandwidth than lantecy QoS. And of course never tried to rely on TOS bits.

The real experience of serious low-latency requirements can be happened shortly
thereafter, locally, when i had to split up a LAN into two, interconnected by
a CPU based router and then the quite competitive doom & quake players
complained that some of them now always lost. The ones NOT on the LAN
as the game master instance of course. Alas, i can not quite remember the exact
forwarding latency across that router hop. Something like 10 msec i think.
I ended up having to re wire a few workstations to the opposite LAN to
serve latency.

Cheers
    Toerless

On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 12:29:21PM -0700, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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