4 ms·

I've read all four volumes of Caro's LBJ biography and praying he doesn't die before finishing the final one. PLATO is not in that category, sorry. I was there

I've read all four volumes of Caro's LBJ biography and praying he doesn't die before finishing the final one. PLATO is not in that category, sorry. I was there (at UIUC). PLATO had an extremely small influence on the University, and especially on the Dept. of Computer Science. We never saw them at DCL. According to the internet-history mailing list (which has essentially all the pioneers who are still alive), they had negligible influence on the Internet. That's not to denigrate PLATO and what they did. It was the pinnacle of what you could do with a mainframe-and-terminals system. They could have had a much bigger influence on computers and society than they had.

felixgallo 4y ago
It’s weird how you keep forcefully insisting on PLATO’s irrelevance in every thread that comes up.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Sorry you find HN participation "weird."
  - felixgallo 4y ago
    It is when it's every single thread. That's when it gets weird. As far as PLATO's impact on the world, I think it's underestimated and underappreciated. I don't give a shit about internet-history, I was one of the first few thousand people on the arpanet too. The actual authors of Mosaic were in CERL quite a bit. Usenet was already going on, but newsreaders (rn, trn, nn, etc.) were clearly influenced by the structure of notes and vice versa. dnd, oubliette and avatar were shamelessly ripped off multiple times and were the early foundation for graphical dungeon crawlers. The idea that PLATO somehow needed to impact the CS department is kind of risible. Like having terminals in DCL was important? What did DCL ever do? PLATO impacted basically every chem, ceram, mech-e, comp-e, edu, edu-tech, geo, physics, etc., student at UIUC, not to mention U Chicago and places like Honolulu and ETH, for more than a decade. Thousands of us who grew up learning TUTOR as /jpr/cerl accounts have ended up having pretty good computer careers, all because of PLATO.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      "every single thread" : it's in the news the last few days. I'll continue to share what I know, and your idea of "weirdness" is your own hangup. We can take it up with dang if you think there's something wrong with it. "having terminals in DCL" : I wasn't aware PLATO invented terminals. "I don't give a shit about internet-history" : OK, that categorizes you. There were lots of ideas, and PLATO had some. I never used the word "irrelevant." However, they are not the lost city of Atlantis or the panspermia idea that suddenly explains everything. They were there; they had some success; they could have had much more and thus wouldn't need to be rediscovered now.
      - theodpHN 4y ago
        But PLATO did pretty much re-invent terminals in the 70's, with a touchscreen (infrared), flat-screen plasma display which later earned Don Bitzer and his two co-inventors an Emmy, was mentioned in an IETF IRC, and was also credited - together with PLATO itself - as inspiring some of Xerox Parc's work by Alan Kay, despite the big differences in technology used by the PLATO and Parc groups. Then there's PLATO Notes, which inspired Ray Ozzie (who worked on PLATO at UIUC) to create Lotus Notes, which pretty much ruled the eMail/workflow world back in the day (Ozzie went on to introduce Azure while Microsoft's CTO/CSA). And while certainly far more primitive, the paradigm of students using PLATO V smart terminals to connect to CDC mainframes that served up courseware in the 1970's bears more than a passing resemblance to how kids in 2023 connect their laptops to Google's Cloud to serve up Khan Academy lessons. _____ ECE alumni win Emmy for inventing the flat-panel plasma display 10/23/2002 https://ece.illinois.edu/newsroom/news/2541 https://ece.illinois.edu/newsroom/news/2541 In early October, three University of Illinois Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) alumni received an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Donald Bitzer (BS ’55, MS ’56, PhD ’60), H. Gene Slottow (PhD ’64), and Robert Willson (PhD ’66) received the prestigious award for inventing the flat-panel plasma display, the forerunner of today’s high-definition flat-panel television monitors. _____ Internet Engineering Task Force RFC 600 - IETF November 1973 https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc600.html https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc600.html INTERFACING AN ILLINOIS PLASMA TERMINAL TO THE ARPANET The PLATO IV System based at the University of Illinois at Urbana is a highly sophisticated and very powerful approach to Computer Aided Instruction. The PLATO IV system makes use of a plasma display terminal that is a unique device with capabilities not presently found on computer terminals. A number of ARPA supported projects intend to use the plasma terminal on local connection to computer resources or by long-distance connection to the PLATO IV System. _____ Quora: Was the Plato IV system any influence on the Alto and PARC in general? Alan Kay I am the Alan Kay in question. Upvoted by Michael David Cobb Bowen, former P/A at Xerox (1982-1989) and Mark Decker, former DocuTech Analyst at Xerox (1979-1997) https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Plato-IV-system-any-influence-on-the-Alto-and-PARC-in-general/answer/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Plato-IV-system-any-influence-... We liked the Plato people a lot. Like the ARPA community and Xerox Parc they just invented and built everything they wanted that they couldn’t buy. But they and Parc were on completely divergent paths. Plato ran on a 1000 terminal time-sharing system, and the displays were slow. So what they went after was very different (some of it was quite good, and some of it inspired us to do better with the vastly more powerful/person Alto). Back to 1968. We were aware that flat screen displays were coming, but it was very exciting and inspiring to actually see a working one. This led to discussions about when the transistors in the Flex Machine could be put on the back of a flat screen display to make a tablet personal computer (the answer was in about 10 years we thought). ______ Lotus Notes (aka HCL Domino) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino "Notes has a history spanning more than 30 years. Its chief inspiration was PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley at the University of Illinois in 1973. In today's terminology, PLATO Notes supported user-created discussion groups, and it was part of the foundation for an online community which thrived for more than 20 years on the PLATO system. Ray Ozzie worked with PLATO while attending the University of Illinois in the 1970s. [...] the installed base of Lotus Notes has increased from an estimated 42 million seats in September 1998 to approximately 140 million cumulative licenses sold through 2008.
brianstorms 4y ago
Who cares about the Internet. (I'm on internet-history... it's a bunch of aging farts, very distinguished and nice aging farts but still, talking about TCP/IP and who did email and who did this and when did that happen etc. That's all swell. My book was not about the Internet. It was about PLATO and from a larger perspective, the rise of cyberculture of which "internet" only a portion.) DCL like the Education dept at UIUC pooh-poohed PLATO from the outset. So it's no wonder they had a snooty attitude (and still do) about PLATO. MIT and Stanford had the same snooty attitue. PLATO was electrical engineering-driven, and science and humanities-driven. Very unusual for such a project, but that was the way it was. Also, my book wasn't about the impact PLATO had on the University, but on cyberculture. The University politicians gladly swept PLATO under the carpet as soon as they could as the NCSA got big money in the 80s, and then the web took off in the 90s. Today it's like PLATO never existed at UIUC. A lot of that is due to decisions the PLATO lab took to stick to clearly antiquated design decisions and a reluctance to embrace client/server and distributed-computing designs. But they had to stick to old ways, because they had an immediate need to deploy, they weren't an ivory tower think tank like Xerox PARC dreaming up what the future might look like in 20 years. PLATO folks were dreaming up the then-present, and they shipped, like any good startup.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - felixgallo 4y ago
    'discredit you as a historian'? You're one weird dude.
    - dang 4y ago
      Please don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how annoying another comment is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - dang 4y ago

felixgallo 4y ago

It’s weird how you keep forcefully insisting on PLATO’s irrelevance in every thread that comes up.

AlbertCory 4y ago
Sorry you find HN participation "weird."
- felixgallo 4y ago
  It is when it's every single thread. That's when it gets weird. As far as PLATO's impact on the world, I think it's underestimated and underappreciated. I don't give a shit about internet-history, I was one of the first few thousand people on the arpanet too. The actual authors of Mosaic were in CERL quite a bit. Usenet was already going on, but newsreaders (rn, trn, nn, etc.) were clearly influenced by the structure of notes and vice versa. dnd, oubliette and avatar were shamelessly ripped off multiple times and were the early foundation for graphical dungeon crawlers. The idea that PLATO somehow needed to impact the CS department is kind of risible. Like having terminals in DCL was important? What did DCL ever do? PLATO impacted basically every chem, ceram, mech-e, comp-e, edu, edu-tech, geo, physics, etc., student at UIUC, not to mention U Chicago and places like Honolulu and ETH, for more than a decade. Thousands of us who grew up learning TUTOR as /jpr/cerl accounts have ended up having pretty good computer careers, all because of PLATO.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    "every single thread" : it's in the news the last few days. I'll continue to share what I know, and your idea of "weirdness" is your own hangup. We can take it up with dang if you think there's something wrong with it. "having terminals in DCL" : I wasn't aware PLATO invented terminals. "I don't give a shit about internet-history" : OK, that categorizes you. There were lots of ideas, and PLATO had some. I never used the word "irrelevant." However, they are not the lost city of Atlantis or the panspermia idea that suddenly explains everything. They were there; they had some success; they could have had much more and thus wouldn't need to be rediscovered now.
    - theodpHN 4y ago
      But PLATO did pretty much re-invent terminals in the 70's, with a touchscreen (infrared), flat-screen plasma display which later earned Don Bitzer and his two co-inventors an Emmy, was mentioned in an IETF IRC, and was also credited - together with PLATO itself - as inspiring some of Xerox Parc's work by Alan Kay, despite the big differences in technology used by the PLATO and Parc groups. Then there's PLATO Notes, which inspired Ray Ozzie (who worked on PLATO at UIUC) to create Lotus Notes, which pretty much ruled the eMail/workflow world back in the day (Ozzie went on to introduce Azure while Microsoft's CTO/CSA). And while certainly far more primitive, the paradigm of students using PLATO V smart terminals to connect to CDC mainframes that served up courseware in the 1970's bears more than a passing resemblance to how kids in 2023 connect their laptops to Google's Cloud to serve up Khan Academy lessons. _____ ECE alumni win Emmy for inventing the flat-panel plasma display 10/23/2002 https://ece.illinois.edu/newsroom/news/2541 https://ece.illinois.edu/newsroom/news/2541 In early October, three University of Illinois Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) alumni received an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Donald Bitzer (BS ’55, MS ’56, PhD ’60), H. Gene Slottow (PhD ’64), and Robert Willson (PhD ’66) received the prestigious award for inventing the flat-panel plasma display, the forerunner of today’s high-definition flat-panel television monitors. _____ Internet Engineering Task Force RFC 600 - IETF November 1973 https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc600.html https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc600.html INTERFACING AN ILLINOIS PLASMA TERMINAL TO THE ARPANET The PLATO IV System based at the University of Illinois at Urbana is a highly sophisticated and very powerful approach to Computer Aided Instruction. The PLATO IV system makes use of a plasma display terminal that is a unique device with capabilities not presently found on computer terminals. A number of ARPA supported projects intend to use the plasma terminal on local connection to computer resources or by long-distance connection to the PLATO IV System. _____ Quora: Was the Plato IV system any influence on the Alto and PARC in general? Alan Kay I am the Alan Kay in question. Upvoted by Michael David Cobb Bowen, former P/A at Xerox (1982-1989) and Mark Decker, former DocuTech Analyst at Xerox (1979-1997) https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Plato-IV-system-any-influence-on-the-Alto-and-PARC-in-general/answer/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Plato-IV-system-any-influence-... We liked the Plato people a lot. Like the ARPA community and Xerox Parc they just invented and built everything they wanted that they couldn’t buy. But they and Parc were on completely divergent paths. Plato ran on a 1000 terminal time-sharing system, and the displays were slow. So what they went after was very different (some of it was quite good, and some of it inspired us to do better with the vastly more powerful/person Alto). Back to 1968. We were aware that flat screen displays were coming, but it was very exciting and inspiring to actually see a working one. This led to discussions about when the transistors in the Flex Machine could be put on the back of a flat screen display to make a tablet personal computer (the answer was in about 10 years we thought). ______ Lotus Notes (aka HCL Domino) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino "Notes has a history spanning more than 30 years. Its chief inspiration was PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley at the University of Illinois in 1973. In today's terminology, PLATO Notes supported user-created discussion groups, and it was part of the foundation for an online community which thrived for more than 20 years on the PLATO system. Ray Ozzie worked with PLATO while attending the University of Illinois in the 1970s. [...] the installed base of Lotus Notes has increased from an estimated 42 million seats in September 1998 to approximately 140 million cumulative licenses sold through 2008.

brianstorms 4y ago

Who cares about the Internet. (I'm on internet-history... it's a bunch of aging farts, very distinguished and nice aging farts but still, talking about TCP/IP and who did email and who did this and when did that happen etc. That's all swell. My book was not about the Internet. It was about PLATO and from a larger perspective, the rise of cyberculture of which "internet" only a portion.) DCL like the Education dept at UIUC pooh-poohed PLATO from the outset. So it's no wonder they had a snooty attitude (and still do) about PLATO. MIT and Stanford had the same snooty attitue. PLATO was electrical engineering-driven, and science and humanities-driven. Very unusual for such a project, but that was the way it was. Also, my book wasn't about the impact PLATO had on the University, but on cyberculture. The University politicians gladly swept PLATO under the carpet as soon as they could as the NCSA got big money in the 80s, and then the web took off in the 90s. Today it's like PLATO never existed at UIUC. A lot of that is due to decisions the PLATO lab took to stick to clearly antiquated design decisions and a reluctance to embrace client/server and distributed-computing designs. But they had to stick to old ways, because they had an immediate need to deploy, they weren't an ivory tower think tank like Xerox PARC dreaming up what the future might look like in 20 years. PLATO folks were dreaming up the then-present, and they shipped, like any good startup.

AlbertCory 4y ago
[flagged]
- felixgallo 4y ago
  'discredit you as a historian'? You're one weird dude.
  - dang 4y ago
    Please don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how annoying another comment is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 4y ago