
A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System - sohkamyung
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tech-history/silicon-revolution/sxsw-2018-a-look-back-at-the-1960s-plato-computing-system
======
walterbell
From the article:

 _" Imagine if today, iOS or Linux had built-in libraries of code that allowed
anyone to build a social application that didn’t require cutting a deal with
Facebook or using their APIs,” … “[With PLATO], the API was in the operating
system and it allowed any app to be social.

… Term Comment … allowed users to leave feedback for developers and
programmers at any place within a program where they spotted a typo or had
trouble completing a task … the user would simply open a comment box and leave
a note right there on the screen. Term Comment would append the comment to the
user’s place in the program so that the recipient could easily navigate to it
and clearly see the problem, instead of trying to recreate it from scratch on
their own system … “If you were doing QA on software, you could quickly
comment, and it would track exactly where the user left this comment. We never
really got this on the Web, and it’s such a shame that we didn’t.”_

~~~
goatlover
Makes you wonder what pioneers back in the 60s and 70s could have accomplished
with modern hardware. What does Smalltalk or Englebert's NLS end up being with
gigs of RAM and high speed network connections? What would the LISP machines
have been like? It still kills me to think that an OS crash on one of those
took you into the Lisp debugger. And it kills me to think that Smalltalk and
Visual Basic had a built-in GUI editor and layout manager, unlike the web.

~~~
TeMPOraL
They'd accomplish a lot, but I fear most of it wouldn't take anyway.

The problem is the Internet. Or, more precisely, _other people_.

Those systems of old didn't separate between "an user" and "a developer"
because they assumed all users are _trusted_ (and responsible people). With
the Internet, this assumption immediately becomes false - between people
attacking the network and social engineering, it's dangerous to let people
have that much control over their environment.

Which is something that pisses me off, because I'd love to work on a modern-
day version of a Lisp machine, but I understand this can't ever become
mainstream (and myself I'd be worried using it to do my banking).

Or, as I sometimes phrase it, Star Trek-level tech requires Star Trek-level
society.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I suspect there are Laws of Social Computing which guarantee that public
networked systems inevitably converge on certain kinds of uses and
applications, with certain consistently reinvented “abuses” and failure modes.

Networked computing is just a mirror. We seem surprised when some of the
things we see it aren’t very nice, but perhaps we shouldn’t be.

------
mncharity
> the entire PLATO system was designed with social sharing in mind, he says,
> whereas the modern Internet is more fundamentally suited to fetching
> websites and documents.

> the API was in the operating system and it allowed any app to be social.
> That was kind of the assumption that the PLATO people had.

Hmm, so why didn't the web emphasize social? Ponder...

Read-only web. The first web browser(s?) were read-write editors. HTTP GET was
paired with PUT. But ramp up happened on read-only browsers (Mosaic,
Navigator). User input wasn't possible until ISINDEX and then FORMs. Write
didn't become part of the culture.

Documents, and separate social. In an ecosystem of ftp, and assorted file
formats, and nntp (usenet news), there was a missing integrative piece.
HMTL/URLs addressed that. Gopher had similar motivation. HTML was a static
document format. But the 'one piece of an ecosystem' model meant social wasn't
tightly integrated. If you wanted social, you did news, not WWW. You posted
urls.

News (distributed social) plateaued, then declined, and the focus of social
development shifted to web sites. I was never quite sure why news development
stalled. There was a multi-year period, where it was clear what needed to be
done to advance (eg voting), but it wasn't happening.

One certainly could have built a pervasively social system on top of the web.
But it's hard for add-on layers to get traction. Even when they were part of
the original vision. For example, X Windows' low-level Xlib, was intended only
for the higher-level libraries everyone would then use, but those were slow to
materialize, so everyone just stuck with Xlib.

Part of why the web worked was its initial simplicity and subsequent feature
creeping. The hypertext community was quite miffed that this toy was getting
traction, when their various more complex systems were not.

But we never got say a news2://... protocol. It seemed dotcom was pulling the
oxygen away from a lot of potential infrastructure-ish projects - perhaps that
was part of it.

Anyway, random musings.

~~~
traviscj
Seems like browser-based PUT is at once "too" generic and simultaneously not
self-describing enough for a lot of input. (Should I be allowed to change my
wife's facebook details?)

The protocol supports rejecting those edits, but what if I want the form
itself to change in response to edits I'm proposing? (Greying out the "change
password" button, or telling me "You can't change the relationship status of
others!")

Stepping up from my examples a bit, it seems like you'd need a pretty
sophisticated model for ACLs and almost arbitrary client side validations,
which we didn't have until javascript.

------
brianstorms
If you want to find out more about the book, I recommend:

[http://friendlyorangeglow.com](http://friendlyorangeglow.com)

that is, after you've gotten a copy of the book. Really, everyone in the YC
world ought to read this book. It is a completely alien history of computing
that has basically nothing to do with Silicon Valley, and in some ways is
heresy to Silicon Valley. The PLATO system was built 1000 miles to the east,
in Illinois, and had very little (but not zero) cross-fertilization with
Silicon Valley thinking. The exception is Xerox PARC, whose people including
Kay and Goldberg had regular interactions and trips back and forth with their
counterparts at the PLATO lab called CERL at Univ of Illinois. I have a whole
chapter on PARC and Kay and how the PLATO project deeply influenced Kay.

But seriously, if you have any interest in the untold histories of:

    
    
      • flat-panel gas-plasma display invention
      • e-learning and online courses (which PLATO was doing, for full credit, as early as mid-60s)
      • MUDs before MUD-1, including 3D dungeon games
      • multiplayer graphical games of all sorts
      • PLATO Notes as a precursor to USENET and Lotus Notes
      • instant messaging in 1973
      • chat rooms in 1973 using Talk-o-matic
      • screen sharing
      • phishing, PLATO-style
      • emoticon long before Internet smileys started
      • crowdsourced online newspapers 
      • the White House threatening to shut down, in 1973, ARPANET and PLATO, completely, because they had online forums talking about impeachment of Nixon
      • tons more
    

I'd recommend you read the book. :)

Meanwhile, feel free to ask me anything.

------
bbulkow
I had my first job programming Plato at UofD. I had my second job building
hardware for replacing the old expensive terminals with pcs running the same
hardware. A few years later, I came to silicon valley to help the people who
put tcp/ip on the Macintosh fight the networking war ( spoiler, tcp/ip won ).

Plato had community, and I even bought my first computer from a guy in
illinois. There was a form of live chat that even spanned different
universities, there were Friday afternoon massively multi player flight
simulator battles. in the late 70's.

let me give you a quick taste of programming in Tutor. Variables were strings,
integers, and shared ( same value for everyone in the program, used for
multiuser experiences ). there were 150 integers, called i1, i2, and whatnot.
There were no symbolic variables.

Since you didn't have to make a network call to communicate between users (
that came with the draconian unix process model ), you could make shared
experiences far more easily than today.

Ah well.

~~~
brianstorms
Yep me too: first programming job was at PLATO at U of D in 1980.

------
brianzelip
For a social history of PLATO, see the 50 Years of Public Computing conference
that took place at UIUC School of Information (the same year as the Computer
History Museum video embedded in the article),
[http://50years.ischool.illinois.edu/](http://50years.ischool.illinois.edu/).

------
justin66
I'm reading Brian Dear's book now, it's great.

~~~
sien
He's on HN

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brianstorms](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brianstorms)

Hour Long Podcast with an interview with him here:

[http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/12/the-
forgotten-...](http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/12/the-forgotten-
story-of-plato-with-brian-dear/)

~~~
kolinko
+1 on the Internet History Podcast episode. It's awesome (other episodes from
IHP as well :) )

