[Air-l] The History of that "Other" Internet: PLATO

Alex Kuskis akuskis at ican.net
Thu Nov 28 09:09:24 PST 2002


I always thought of PLATO as a mainframe-based online Learning
Management System (LMS), the antecedent of groupware such as
Lotus Notes. I was exposed to it in 1988 when I was enrolled in a
computer technology program at Control Data Institute (the software
ran on Control Data mainframes), which was delivered online in a
self-paced fashion. See David Woolley's article at:
http://thinkofit.com/webconf/wcchoice.htm
I did not realize there was such an extensive online community
behind this technology. The legacy of some of that technology must
be being carried forward by Wolley's company Thinkofit.com . See
http://thinkofit.com/ .
Alex.Kuskis
Alex.Kuskis at utoronto.ca

----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Thomas" <frank.thomasftr at free.fr>
To: <air-l at aoir.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 28, 2002 5:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] The History of that "Other" Internet: PLATO


Brian,
I like it! You may compare this history with the development of the
French minitel. Why did Plato die (or is it still alive?) and Minitel
did not ? Minitel is a cash cow today and prepared French users to pay
for even the most standard kind of info, such as train departures. At
the same time, it increased the public expectations of how safe a
electronic billing system should be - i.e. very safe, much more than
internet. So, it shaped well today's public evaluation of the internet.
Is there any long-term fall-out of Plato other than the one you mentioned ?

When will your book be published ?

Go on, you have a great story

Frank


Brian Dear wrote:

> The current AoIR thread on the history (or histories) of the Internet
> is interesting.   I couldn't resist mentioning a project I'm working
> on that is at the same time related and unrelated.
>
> I'm writing a book on the history of  "another" internet, one that
> developed independently of, and parallel to, the ARPAnet back in the
> 60s, 70s, and 80s: the PLATO network.  Ironically, it was funded by
> the same agencies: ARPA, ONR, NSF.   Incredibly, its actual history,
> significance, and massive influence are for all intents and purposes,
> completely unknown to most people.
>
> For a while in the 70s, the PLATO network was larger, in terms of
> number of actual users, than the ARPAnet.   And during that same
> while, and arguably for some time thereafter, PLATO was more advanced
> than the ARPAnet and offered capabilities some of which would not
> appear on the Internet for 10 to 15 more years.   It's as if PLATO was
> this separate species, developing in a heretofore unknown geographical
> region, that catapulted up the food-chain in a remarkably fast way,
> only to die out just as remarkably quickly.   Survival of the fittest,
> or luckiest?   One question I'm investigating.
>
> During the 1970s, PLATO developed at a tremendously accelerated pace,
> something we would not see until the late 80s, early 90s on the
> Internet.   Every day on PLATO, new tools and new applications would
> appear: many originated by the PLATO systems staff, but many more by
> the user community itself.  PLATO's programming language, called
> TUTOR, was designed for people to create computer-assisted instruction
> lessons, but the prevailing philosophy on PLATO, one of "anything
> goes" and "be flexible, you never know what the needs of the next
> developer will be" were such that TUTOR became extremely open-ended
> and well-documented, enabling mere mortals to develop all kinds of
> things the PLATO creators had never envisioned: games, simulations,
> multiuser communication and collaboration tools, text editors,
> scientific applications, interfaces to all kinds of different hardware
> devices, etc.
>
> The result was -- nearly overnight -- a rich, vibrant online
> community, remarkably similar to online communities that would pop up
> everywhere over the ensuing decades.   The PLATO system, while
> mainframe-based, was viewed by its users as a very "personal" computer
> in the sense of "a tool that lets you communicate and collaborate with
> other people".   Sun Microsystems would grasp the notion (with its
> "the network is the computer" slogan) early in the 80s, but this was
> not a common conception in the 1970s --- to Apple and Microsoft, for
> example, "PC" would for many years simply signify "personal desktop
> machine to do my number-crunching, document-preparation, and BASIC
> programming".
>
> Many who came into contact with PLATO in the 1970s would have their
> lives and careers permanently altered by the experience, and by the
> realization of what computer networks really implied about the future
> of daily life.   PLATO people were in the 1970s already living the
> always-on, always-accessible "digital lifestyle" that has only
> recently become commonplace.  You didn't "use" PLATO, you "lived"
> PLATO.   Lotus Notes (a product designed for office-workers to "live"
> in all day long) is but one case of a technology that came about
> precisely because its inventors, Ray Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen, and Len
> Kawell, had previously been exposed to and immersed in the PLATO
> system -- and the PLATO Notes application, among others -- while
> students at the University of Illinois.
>
> The PLATO culture is a fascinating microcosm of and precursor to
> today's Internet, both socially and technically.   Study the PLATO
> world of the 1970s and you find issues ranging from the Hacker Ethic
> to free speech and government censorship; from open-source arguments
> to security and privacy concerns; from online collaboration to
> blog-like multi-user content management systems; from the evolution of
> chat and email to the rise of graphical-smileys and "emoticons"; from
> message forums on thousands of subjects, years before Usenet, to the
> dawn of MUDs and massively multiplayer games; from multimedia to
> complex scientific simulations; from online dating, relationship
> counseling, romances, and marriages to stalking, divorces,
> suicides....  You name it, and it happened on PLATO, during the same
> era where Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Case, and Scott McNeally were
> still all in high school, and Nixon was still president.
>
> Is all this significant?  Should we care?  Absolutely it's
> significant.  Absolutely we should care.
>
> It's my hope that by writing this book on the history of PLATO two
> things will happen: 1) a huge gaping hole in the history of the
> Information Age will finally be at least a tiny bit "plugged", and 2)
> we will understand and appreciate the Internet, the Web, AOL, and
> Cyber-culture in general in new and much richer ways.    After all, it
> turns out that much of what happened on the Internet already had
> happened -- a long time ago, in a cyberspace far, far away.   Why that
> is so, how that came to be, and why the Internet "won" and PLATO
> "lost" are three major questions I hope to answer in this book.   I
> welcome your thoughts, questions, and ideas.
>
> - Brian
>
> Brian Dear
> PLATO History Project
> La Jolla, CA
> brian at platopeople.com
> http://www.platopeople.com
>
>
>
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>
>

--
----------------------------
Frank Thomas
FTR Internet Research
321, boulevard de la Boissière
93110 Rosny-sous-Bois
France
tél. 0033.1.48.94.36.90




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