6 ms·

While very impressive, I don't really see any clear signs/pieces of evidence that this effort shaped the future, though.

by tpmx 4y ago

theodpHN 4y ago
Computer History Museum DON BITZER 2022 Fellow https://computerhistory.org/profile/don-bitzer/ https://computerhistory.org/profile/don-bitzer/ For pioneering online education and communities with PLATO and coinventing the plasma display When networks like the Internet were still a research lab curiosity, Don Bitzer's multiuser PLATO system served as a dress rehearsal for what we do on those networks today – learn, teach, collaborate, chat, mail, play games, argue, and more. PLATO's courseware language and touchscreen, multimedia terminals previewed features of decades hence. PLATO was a postcard from the future of online communities, and its example would help make that future real. Donald L. Bitzer was born January 1, 1934 and is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is co-inventor of the flat-panel plasma display and the "father of PLATO,” the world’s earliest time-shared, computer-based education system and home to one of the world’s most pioneering online communities.
williamDafoe 4y ago
Xerox PARC stole everything they could from PLATO after their 1972 tour of PLATO and being PhDs never gave credit where credit was due! Picture language, app generator, multilingual fonts, a system so simple even a kid could learn to program it (I did at age 14, self taught), bitmap graphics, etc. When I went to work at Xerox Office Systems Division - the development arm of PARC - I would say that after 13 years of trying - with computers 10x faster - they were PARTIALLY caught up! Highly inferior communications tools, and no support for inter-terminal games . .
- tpmx 4y ago
  Thanks to you and the others for very thorough answers!
- knuckleheadsmif 4y ago
  I never heard of the Plato connection when I worked on Star in the 80s at Xerox. This is news to me. I’d really like to see more documented proof of this. I also working on the Multilingual stuff (I implemented the bidi stuff in the Star editor) with my friend Joe Becker and never heard of influence from PLATO. I’ll ask directly next time we talk but I just don’t believe it’s true at all.
  - williamDafoe 4y ago
    The 1972 tour is widely known, but if you worked at Xerox in the early days you should know that they are good at taking credit and minimizing the work of others who came before them. It goes with the egos which were too large to fit in hyperspace. P.S. who are you? we should talk.
brianstorms 4y ago
History doesn't quite work as nicely as one might like. Fact is, dozens, probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of PLATO people wound up working in the tech industry, had long careers there at DEC, Data General, Sun Microsystems, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc etc etc etc. The last section of my book documents some of the influences, including the most obvious one, Ray Ozzie's Iris project which created Lotus Notes, named after PLATO Notes. Lotus Notes had like 100 million users and was sold to IBM for billions of dollars. It had a huge influence on the corporate IT world. And AuthorWare was developed by PLATO people, and got merged with Macromind, creating MacroMedia, which was ultimately gobbled up for billions by Adobe. There's a lot of influence, but there's 100000x more noise and other stuff since, so it's buried and therefore the normal conclusion is "oh, there's no evidence so there was no impact" but that's too easy to dismiss... there's lots of impact, and PLATO people went everywhere, including me, doing a bunch of startups all of which were influenced by PLATO in one or more ways
- jonjacky 4y ago
  Not just tech industry people. The prolific, Pulitzer prize winning novelist Richard Powers [1] learned to program on PLATO and worked as a programmer before quitting to write full-time. His novel The Gold Bug Variations [2] is set at a Midwestern university, I can't recall if it is identified as UIUC. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Powers 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Bug_Variations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Bug_Variations

While very impressive, I don't really see any clear signs/pieces of evidence that this effort shaped the future, though.

by tpmx 4y ago

While very impressive, I don't really see any clear signs/pieces of evidence that this effort shaped the future, though.

theodpHN 4y ago

Computer History Museum DON BITZER 2022 Fellow https://computerhistory.org/profile/don-bitzer/ https://computerhistory.org/profile/don-bitzer/ For pioneering online education and communities with PLATO and coinventing the plasma display When networks like the Internet were still a research lab curiosity, Don Bitzer's multiuser PLATO system served as a dress rehearsal for what we do on those networks today – learn, teach, collaborate, chat, mail, play games, argue, and more. PLATO's courseware language and touchscreen, multimedia terminals previewed features of decades hence. PLATO was a postcard from the future of online communities, and its example would help make that future real. Donald L. Bitzer was born January 1, 1934 and is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is co-inventor of the flat-panel plasma display and the "father of PLATO,” the world’s earliest time-shared, computer-based education system and home to one of the world’s most pioneering online communities.

williamDafoe 4y ago

Xerox PARC stole everything they could from PLATO after their 1972 tour of PLATO and being PhDs never gave credit where credit was due! Picture language, app generator, multilingual fonts, a system so simple even a kid could learn to program it (I did at age 14, self taught), bitmap graphics, etc. When I went to work at Xerox Office Systems Division - the development arm of PARC - I would say that after 13 years of trying - with computers 10x faster - they were PARTIALLY caught up! Highly inferior communications tools, and no support for inter-terminal games . .

tpmx 4y ago
Thanks to you and the others for very thorough answers!
knuckleheadsmif 4y ago
I never heard of the Plato connection when I worked on Star in the 80s at Xerox. This is news to me. I’d really like to see more documented proof of this. I also working on the Multilingual stuff (I implemented the bidi stuff in the Star editor) with my friend Joe Becker and never heard of influence from PLATO. I’ll ask directly next time we talk but I just don’t believe it’s true at all.
- williamDafoe 4y ago
  The 1972 tour is widely known, but if you worked at Xerox in the early days you should know that they are good at taking credit and minimizing the work of others who came before them. It goes with the egos which were too large to fit in hyperspace. P.S. who are you? we should talk.

brianstorms 4y ago

History doesn't quite work as nicely as one might like. Fact is, dozens, probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of PLATO people wound up working in the tech industry, had long careers there at DEC, Data General, Sun Microsystems, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc etc etc etc. The last section of my book documents some of the influences, including the most obvious one, Ray Ozzie's Iris project which created Lotus Notes, named after PLATO Notes. Lotus Notes had like 100 million users and was sold to IBM for billions of dollars. It had a huge influence on the corporate IT world. And AuthorWare was developed by PLATO people, and got merged with Macromind, creating MacroMedia, which was ultimately gobbled up for billions by Adobe. There's a lot of influence, but there's 100000x more noise and other stuff since, so it's buried and therefore the normal conclusion is "oh, there's no evidence so there was no impact" but that's too easy to dismiss... there's lots of impact, and PLATO people went everywhere, including me, doing a bunch of startups all of which were influenced by PLATO in one or more ways

jonjacky 4y ago
Not just tech industry people. The prolific, Pulitzer prize winning novelist Richard Powers [1] learned to program on PLATO and worked as a programmer before quitting to write full-time. His novel The Gold Bug Variations [2] is set at a Midwestern university, I can't recall if it is identified as UIUC. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Powers 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Bug_Variations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Bug_Variations