Where Were You When PLATO Was Born? 162
PLATO, cradle of so many firsts, was born 50 years ago. Next week the Computer History Museum is hosting a two-day conference to celebrate the anniversary. Microsoft's Ray Ozzie, who worked on PLATO as an undergraduate, will be one of the keynote speakers. Co-producer Brian Dear has put together a list of today's technology notables and what they were doing in 1973, the year that social computing suddenly blossomed on PLATO.
Old company (Score:1, Interesting)
I used to work for them many years back and it was the most archaic company I have ever worked for. Far older than Microsoft or Apple or most other traditional technology companies. Your talking about a company that was old enough to have one of the original licenses for commercial Unix from the early 70's (it was considered an asset of some value at the time even though they no longer produced it). They had technology in use at that time that was 15-20 years old at and still actively supported.
I learned a lot by working with some pretty diverse environments - I distinctly recall having to solve a problem with token ring, 10base2, and a lightning strike all inside a federal maximum security prison. Did I mention the admins were convicted murderers?
The company today is a shell of it's former self, and I think surprises many with it's continued survival. They had a lot of very good internal technology staff, but have long been plagued by management issues. I recall before Y2K the company was claiming their software did not have Y2K issues when it was nowhere near Y2K compliant. Management officially refused to acknowledge the issue and threatened to fire anyone that put anything in writing.
I bribed a developer with a bottle of mountain dew to put a hard checksum into the installer code that would present a unique and undocumented error if someone tried rolling back the clock before installing the software. We got many calls about the mysterious installation error, with every institution that received it told to make sure their system date was correct. They survived Y2K without a single system going down, perhaps the first and last time a company was saved by a 20oz bottle of mountain dew.
They could have been sued into oblivion by any number of institutions if all their data was wiped as they knew about the Y2K issues. This was data that was used to do things like justifying rank for the military, determine if prisoners got out of prison or if students graduated school. Since their public stance was they were Y2K compliant, and a code review would prove otherwise, it was a pretty big deal at the time. When your customers are people like the federal government and the Bill Gates foundation, they have more money for lawyers than you do.
Re:So, What Is PLATO? (Score:5, Interesting)
PLATO was where I learned to program. Where I learned how to write a couple of lines of TUTOR (back before they even had an FM to R) and then hit Shift-EDIT. That sent me through the "compilor" (their word, not mine) and straight into execution. As soon as I liked/didn't like what I saw, I hit Shift-EDIT again and I was back in the editor exactly where I had been.
This means that in 1973 I learned to work with an Edit-Compile-Execute-Edit cycle that was often measured in less than 10 seconds. It's a hell of a way to learn quickly.
You use IM? I was using Talkomatic in 1973. You use forums? Try Notes (and I don't mean Lotus), again in 1973. MMO Games? Dogfight (1973) or even Nova (1974) (I was the coauthor with Al McNeil). Touch panel? Been there, got the T-shirt (and I still have this bee stuck to my finger (that's a deep, deep PLATO old-timer's joke.))
Between PLATO in the early 70's, and Xerox in Palo Alto in the late 70's (where I was on the BravoX Project at ASD (think "Microsoft Word")), about 80%+ of the fundamental user interface and the foundations of networking (communications and social) were created. In some cases these functions not only haven't improved all that much, some of it is sliding back down hill.
That doesn't mean you need to kiss our ass or anything, but some people around here really need to understand that the world did not start when they were born. It makes me cringe to even hear me say it, but sometimes the arrogance of the young—many of whom cannot be bothered to read even the history of their own industry—really wears thin.
Re:Exploration (Score:4, Interesting)
From what I've read about PLATO (I was born quite a bit after PLATO's heyday) it seemed to be in stark contrast with today's methods of teaching computers. It seemed like PLATO actually encouraged students to explore computers. Today though, teachers are too paranoid, thinking that the command prompt will "break" the computer and other stupidities.
When I was a student back in the days of PLATO, I had a part time job as the human tutor in one of the PLATO terminal rooms. I don't remember it being focused at all on exploring computers. The system was all about the pre-canned apps. In fact, my memory is a little rusty, but I don't recall that they really had a command prompt at all, at least as far as end users were concerned. I think it was all a hierarchical full screen menu-driven system. (I assume that some CS majors were taught how to write software for PLATO, but that would be a small minority of the users.)
One problem with the course that I worked with was that the software was a bit too linear and inflexible. For example, students weren't allowed to go on to the next problem until they correctly answered the current one, and the range of acceptable answers was usually very constrained. The software basically kept repeating: "Wrong. Try again.", and you were stuck at a dead end.
Unfortunately, back in those days this was often the first exposure the users had to a computer system of any kind. They had never experienced anything as exacting and unforgiving as a computer, and it didn't help to heap that on top of the inherent stress of a "weed-out" engineering class. That's why they needed me to be in there as a backup; I think that some of the people would have eventually gone postal on the terminals if they didn't have access to someone who could see how and why they were stuck, and dole out helpful hints.
No Plato users here? (Score:4, Interesting)
Jeez, I can't believe I'm the first actual Plato user to post. I played lots of games on Plato in the middle of the night while I was writing my thesis in 1977-1978. It was amazing at the time -- an online system where you could play real-time networked games with people across the country built around a plasma bit-mapped "high resolution" display (probably 512x512 pixels). There was even a quasi-three-dimensional game called dnd where you explored dungeons with a party of other players. ("Quasi 3-D" because all it could do was draw the lines indicating the corners of walls, ceilings, floors.)
Anyway, I think it was way ahead of its time. I don't know how successful it was as an educational system, but it ought to be legendary as a network gaming system.
Re:Notesfiles and graphical Star Trek (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got a better one:
Where were you when Half-Life came out, and which classes did you miss because of it?
I distinctly recall having a big file of undergrad papers to grade and saying "Fuck it. Not when there's a rent in the fabric of space and time".
I Flunked Out of College Because of Plato (Score:5, Interesting)
I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1980s and I flunked out of college in part because of spending too much time playing games on PLATO, particularly a MMO dungeon game called Avatar. The way things worked, the "free" (i.e. not connected to coursework) account I had could only be used at night. As a result, I and similar Avatar addicts would gather in the basement computer lab on Friday night and play until around 5AM or so, when the system went offline for maintenance. At that point we would go to IHOP for breakfast, then return at 6AM to play another couple of hours, until our accounts were booted off at 8AM.
Strangely enough, this was not conducive to good study habits! Luckily, after I flunked out, I managed to get accepted into another university which did NOT use PLATO! :-)
You can install software that emulates a PLATO terminal, allowing you to connect to a PLATO host (Cyber1.org).
Here's a video introduction to cyber1.org: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgMG9NCWoaU [youtube.com]
And here's a video showing a battle in Empire (a Star Trek space battle game): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMPC1eG5cko [youtube.com]
You'll need to view these videos large to really see what's happening.
Re:So, What Is PLATO? (Score:3, Interesting)
PLATO Was Alan Kay's Muse (Score:3, Interesting)
Brian Dear, on PLATO: [well.com] One of the most interesting little-known aspects of Xerox PARC has to do with its relationship to PLATO. What people don't realize is that Kay attended a 1968 symposium sponsored by ARPA, at the Univ of Illinois. Among the presenters was Don Bitzer and company, and what did they present? A 1-inch-by 1-inch prototype of a gas plasma flat-panel display. This was a major "aha" moment for Kay, who told me it was his "big whammy" epiphany. It suddenly occurred to him that computers of the future were not going to have big, bulky CRT screens, but rather, flat-panel displays. It is directly because of his seeing the demo of the PLATO plasma prototype that he got the idea for the Dynabook.