The Internet That Wasn’t: Review of “The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear | Hacker News Reader

The Internet That Wasn’t: Review of “The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear

nature.com

86 pointssohkamyung24 comments

Some quick comments on this book review from the author of the book:

1. The vision didn't ultimately fail. It lives on in all sorts of ways today -- we just don't recognize it as having come from PLATO.

2. The review seems almost eager to celebrate the demise of PLATO before we get a chance to know what PLATO was.

3. I don't bemoan the failure of teaching machines: if by that the reviewer means Skinner devices.

4. The reviewer calls the book "a worthy addition to the history of computer science" which is misleading -- the book has little to say about computer science, and computer science and computer scientists had very little (nice) to say about PLATO. This is not as book by, for, and about computer science. It's a book about a big slice of American history, a biography of a technology vision as lived through the cast of characters who lived and breathed that vision.

5. The reviewer seemed to miss the whole point of Part II of the book, which is the most interesting and fun third of the book -- how the hacker kids took over PLATO in the 70s and brought forth what I call the "interpersonal computer revolution" before the personal computer revolution even got started. PLATO was the best early example of social computing but you'd never know it reading this NATURE review, which is a shame. I urge folks to check out the book themselves.

The review author seems to think that it was "maddening" that the PLATO team didn't see that personal computers were the way to go when they became available in the late 1970s, but I wonder if the reviewer really understands just how limited personal computers were then -- they couldn't really handle things of the sophistication of PLATO lessons until the mid 1980s at least -- and even then you'd miss out on the multiuser concepts.

Some additional comments about the review versus what's actually in the book. Here is a short list of SOME of the stories told in the book:

- The birth of e-learning / computer-based education

- The creation of time-sharing (not at MIT)

- The invention of the gas-plasma flat-panel display for PLATO

- The invention of touch screens for the PLATO display

- How seeing an early prototype of the plasma display changed Alan Kay's life and led to the vision of the Dynabook

- The secret the founders of Xerox PARC did not what you to ever know (imagine a completely different Silicon Valley today for one thing)

- The first instance of government cyber-censorship: in 1973, the Nixon White House wanted to shut down ARPANET and PLATO due to people posting messages advocating for Nixon's impeachment

- How early multiplayer games evolved quickly on PLATO

- The rise of the hacker culture on PLATO in the 70s

- The first multi-user chat room Talkomatic appears in 1973

- So does instant messaging, in 1973

- So do message forums in the form of PLATO Notes in 1973 (which would directly lead to Lotus Notes)

- PLATO quickly became a teeming social hangout online, with addictive games and early net.celebrities

- The first MUDs (multi-user dungeons) appear on PLATO long before anywhere else, despite what the history says

- PLATO developed its own set of emoticons/emoji nearly 10 years before the :-) appeared elsewhere

- How Control Data Corporation botched its opportunity to own personal computing and online services multiple times.

There's a ton more. Read the book.

I also wrote a piece on this book a couple of weeks ago (for Motherboard) and had a chance to interview Brian for it, and I feel like Brian's comments on the matter ring true—the most relevant parts of the PLATO story were the parts that really had nothing to do with the system's development and commercial sale, but the way that users invented ways to maximize the technology they had.

One could argue that UIUC (and later Control Data) focused on the wrong system infrastructure by leaning on mainframes and ignoring the later impact of personal computers, but it risks missing out on the most interesting parts of this story, which are the ones where people who actually used the system broke its intended use case.

Pieces like these are tough to break down—summarizing a 600+-page book in a 1,000-word article isn't for the faint of heart—but considering so much of the book was spent highlighting this point, the omission of this discussion in the linked review is unfortunate.

(And for what it's worth, I'm not linking my piece because I don't come to criticize the writer or say my article is better, but because I think this context is important to highlight.)

Some trivia - PLATO influenced Greenberg and Woodhead who went on to write Wizardry - which went on in turn to influence Sakaguchi who created Final Fantasy.

As usual on topics touching on the early days of computer gaming, Jimmy Maher has great posts on the subject on his Digital Antiquarian site:

http://www.filfre.net/2011/08/the-first-crpgs/

http://www.filfre.net/2012/03/the-roots-of-sir-tech/

http://www.filfre.net/2012/03/making-wizardry/

http://www.filfre.net/2012/03/playing-wizardry/

Mahjong solitaire also started on PLATO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong_solitaire#Computer_gam...

I devote an entire chapter to the origins of Mah-jongg on PLATO and how it became Shanghai on Mac and PC

PLATO was also the place where Notes first took off, which was a predecessor to USENET, which is the predecessor to the WWW.

Yeah i have sometimes pondered why the terminal+mainframe combo never took of like the net did. And in the end i think it comes down to "multiplexing".

Notice how some talk about having 100s of browser tabs open. This may be to one site like wikipedia, or a multitude of sites as they follwed some chain of links down a proverbial rabbit hole in search of something.

Similarly, dialing into an ISP didn't just allowe me to look up what that ISP had stored back during the early days.

I had IRC, NNTP, email, web, and new stuff sprung up almost weekly it seemed.

And for the most part i could have all of that going on a single connection.

The net was not and ends, it was a means to an ends.

This similar to how an OS, desktop or even app is not an ends, but a means to some ends. Some task i want to perform, be it calculate taxes, check news or communicate with friends or family.

There were terminal systems with integrated multiplexing. The one that survives into the modern age is the Bloomberg terminal, I suppose.

The great advantage of the Internet is that it doesn't have integrated billing. This allowed marginal price to be driven to zero and the user to consume as much as they want without worry.

I admit i am not familiar with the capabilities of a Bloomberg terminal, but i have the impression that it is tied strictly to the Bloomberg service.

What i was thinking more of was how we can bring up the likes of Facebook and Twitter while only maintaining a connection to our ISP.

I guess one could go deeper down the stack, and compare packet switched and circuit switched. This in that to me a terminal connection suggests a circuit switched connection.

Yes, later on one got the idea of the terminal server. But the fundamental idea of a terminal, at least at the time, was that of a very intimate connection between terminal and a (rather bulky) computer.

I think internet connectivity was too expensive and unstable for cconsumers and small business for something like a terminal to take off when the internet took off(late 90ties, 2000snds).

Yeah i have sometimes pondered why the terminal+mainframe combo never took of like the net did

Replace terminal with smartphone and mainframe with cloud...

Or ChromeOS. The web have indeed taken on some semblance of this over the years.

In the late 90s, my high school used a system called NovaNET, which was based on PLATO. It was used for individual learning, special education, etc. I learned a bit of Russian with it, other kids did remedial math and English, and some just played games. It used a Windows client to connect to the NovaNET "mainframe"(?), had some color graphics, and supported Cyrillic. It only shut down in 2015: http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2015/08/august-31-2015-the-...

There really should be at least a mention of Minitel in articles like these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

> Unlike ARPANET, PLATO was not designed to be a seed that sprouted into a tree of networked computing. Rather, it was a single branch that grew in the wrong direction, and subsequently withered.

I'd disagree to an extent, as multiple PLATO sites, each with its own CDC mainframe host, were networked with one another. The point stands that the terminals-into-mainframes paradigm persisted, but almost anything that would have been on ARPAnet in that era would have been a large (VAX-class or bigger) system save for the lucky few with Sun workstations.

I was at UIUC in the mid-1980s, and I thought it odd that PLATO and ARPAnet were isolated from one another. Usenet was available via the "notes" client that mimicked PLATO notes in style, but was never linked to PLATO. I guess it didn't help that PLATO lived in the CDC mainframe world and spoke neither ASCII nor EBCDIC.

Online networked discussion forums, online chat, even MMOs existed on PLATO decades ago, and not integrating it with ARPAnet was a huge wasted opportunity.

Another example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

> The Minitel was a Videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services.

I have fond memories of PLATO, Tutor, and AIDS. There's gotta be an avatar port somewhere...

There's a full emulated PLATO mainframe online at:

https://www.cyber1.org/

Connecting to this system, I feel like a futuristic alien, stationed outside Earth, with hundreds of millions of times more capacity on his lap, taking a curious interest in the precious few bytes on this primitive system he's observing, and doing it all casually before breakfast.

What do the different signon groups mean?

(To any administrator reading this: The contact form doesn't work.)

PLATO was the Concorde of its time. It showed how technology and social interaction would create new tools and cultures.

Since ubiquitous computing and communication were far in the future, it never had the breakthrough it deserved.

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