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Where Were You When PLATO Was Born?
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.
PLATO rocked, but to be honest it didn't have anything to do with me.
Think of a better headline.
I piss off bigots.
Sorry, but Plato was born and died a few thousand years before I was.
(Yeah, I know, wrong Plato, but with that headline, you knew someone was going to say it.)
The links don't say what PLATO is, except "the greatest untold story in the history of computing". So, what the heck is it?
Where were you when PLATO _WAS BORN_?
Then I read that PLATO was born 50 years ago.
Then I read that someone put together a list of what people were doing in 1973.
So, I'm to understand that 2010 - 1973 = 50.
I know it's news for nerds... but I've never heard of this PLATO (other than the philosopher), and it would be nice to explain what it is in the summary or in an editor's sentence at the start.
Ryan Fenton
...because I wasn't born yet.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
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.
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.
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".
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
And here's a video showing a battle in Empire (a Star Trek space battle game): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMPC1eG5cko
You'll need to view these videos large to really see what's happening.
Asking a question when you're looking for information is not the Socratic method. That's being a student, asking a teacher. The Socratic method involves the teacher asking the student a question in order to get the student to think about the problem.
IMO, the AC, despite being rhetorical, is much closer to being Socratic than GGP.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Brian Dear, on PLATO: 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.