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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 a
by 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 agoPlease 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 agoPlease make your substantive points without personal attacks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- brianstorms 4y agoI interviewed a number of CS profs who worked at DCL in the 60s/70s/80s including H George Friedman, who was one of the few CS dept people who gave PLATO a try and built lessons for his programming students. Also, a full BASIC emulator was written. I think a FORTRAN was too. And definitely a LOGO environment. But as George told me, DCL looked down on CERL. DCL was an IBM shop. CERL was a CDC/CYBER shop. Oil and water. And it's not about PLATO trying to "gain acceptance" at DCL. Other than George and maybe one or two other profs, nobody was interested. And CERL had its hands full with departments all over campus, and over 1000 terminals all over campus and as far away as Hawaii and Delaware, using the system. I'm not going to engage anymore with you. I've said my piece and we're done. Good day to you.
- AlbertCory 4y agoFarewell, and you can just read this about Friedman: I had two courses from him. No PLATO.