The History of that "Other" Internet: PLATO
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@platopeople.com http://www.platopeople.com
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@platopeople.com http://www.platopeople.com
_______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l
-- ---------------------------- Frank Thomas FTR Internet Research 321, boulevard de la Boissière 93110 Rosny-sous-Bois France tél. 0033.1.48.94.36.90
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@utoronto.ca ----- Original Message ----- From: "Frank Thomas" <frank.thomasftr@free.fr> To: <air-l@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@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 _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l
Brian et al - I have some good info on Plato here, and have linked to your site for some time ;-) http://livinginternet.com/r/ri_talk.htm Cheers, Bill At 10:29 PM 11/27/02 -0800, you 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.
I suggest Brian that you arrange to interview Distinguished Prof. Murray Turoff at NJIT about the EIES system whose development started in the 1960s. There is a strong connection to it and how Lotus Notes came about that relate to PLATO, there is also a connection to it and the WELL. Quentin
This is a thread made for me to contribute to... EIES actually started in 1974. Murray Turoff has reviewed and contributed to the following page: http://livinginternet.com/r/ri_eies.htm Turoff's comment on LivingInternet.com: "A great reference for people who want to get a concise and valid historical perspective on the evolution of the net as a whole." The comments of others who helped create the Internet: http://livinginternet.com/tcomments.htm All the best, Bill At 11:03 AM 11/28/02 -0500, you wrote:
I suggest Brian that you arrange to interview Distinguished Prof. Murray Turoff at NJIT about the EIES system whose development started in the 1960s. There is a strong connection to it and how Lotus Notes came about that relate to PLATO, there is also a connection to it and the WELL.
Quentin
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A personal PLATO sidenote... I grew up in Urbana, home of PLATO, and in grade school when I was 9 years old (early 1970s) we had several PLATO terminals in our classroom. I can't remember for the life of me what we DID with it, but I do remember choosing to stay after school so I could spend more time on it. I remember a lot of us being into it. (I'd be curious if those of you working on it can give me clues to what might have brought a bunch of 9 year olds to it with rapt fascination). I've kind of wondered in recent years if that early experience set me up to be interested in the Internet and to help with the creation of this association... Happy Thanksgiving all you Americans. Enjoy the day all the rest of you! Off to roast my turkey... Nancy ________________________________________________________ Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas 102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org
participants (6)
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Alex Kuskis -
Brian Dear -
Frank Thomas -
Nancy Baym -
Quentin (Gad) Jones -
William Stewart