Today the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent to Google for its Google Doodles feature, wherein the company's home page logo is customized on certain holidays or days to commemorate a certain person, place, or thing.
Problem is, this is not Sergey Brin's or Google's invention. It is PLATO's. (And who knows, there might have been prior art even before the early to mid 1970s when the practice was commonplace on PLATO's "welcome page.")
Consider that Sergey Brin was born on August 21, 1973. Thanksgiving day that year fell on November 22, 1973. On that day, the PLATO welcome page looked like this:
Sergey Brin, inventor of the customized welcome to celebrate a holiday, was just 93 days old. I know he was brilliant, but I didn't think he was that brilliant. I also didn't know he had an author signon on the CERL PLATO system. The things one learns...
Now, a persnickety IP lawyer might say, but look, what Google is claiming is a customized logo not a customized clock. On PLATO welcome pages, when a special day arrived, the clock was customized, not the logo. To which i would say, you're being persnickety and that is not the point. The general idea is identical. Top of fold, most prominent thing on the introductory page of a computer service gets customized for special occasions to attract user attention and have a little fun in the process. End of story.
Here's an example of a Google Doogle celebrating Thanksgiving 2010:.
Google's 2010 Thanksgiving welcome page. 37 years after PLATO.
(Thanks to a tip from "theodp", whose actual name I have never known in all the years he or she has been emailing me.)
It was fifty years ago today that a then 27-year-old electrical engineering PhD whiz kid named Don Bitzer, along with mathematician colleague Peter Braunfeld, demonstrated the PLATO II system to the assembled dignitaries, including David Dodds Henry, the President of the University of Illinois. The event was called the "President's Faculty Conference on Improving Our Educational Aims in the Sixties" and was attended by over 100 faculty members and assorted guests.
It's a significant date because it was a very early public demonstration not only of computer-based education, but also of time-sharing and remote access of a computer system. The demo was held at the Allerton House, 30 miles to the west of the University of Illinois' ILLIAC computer at the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory.
Here's a photo from March 10th, showing Don seated on the floor, talking on the phone, trying to get things to work between Allerton and the PLATO lab back at the university:
Note the keyboard on the chair on the left. It has about 16 keys. Home-made. Built-from scratch. And the "monitor" on the chair on the right is, you guessed right, a cheap black-and-white TV.
The demo was a big success and helped propel the PLATO project forward. Within two years would arrive PLATO III, running on a more powerful CDC 1604 computer. PLATO II was a proof of concept that PLATO could run with simultaneous users, in this case two, but the idea was "N", as in, if you can run two users, it might as well be N users, with N limited merely by memory, CPU, and other resources.
Read update at end of this post... the post's title is no longer true
Thanks to everyone who voted for this session proposal, "Lessons Learned from the First Online Newspaper in 1974." I just learned that it's been officially accepted into the program for the SXSW Interactive 2011 conference in Austin, TX in March.
This talk is based on a chapter I've written for my upcoming book The Friendly Orange Glow, about the story of Red Sweater and his Red Sweater News Service aka NewsReport, which I argue is the the world's first online newspaper and blog.
UPDATE: Seems that SXSW did NOT in fact accept my proposal, but decided on their own to sign me up for something else that I did not even propose to them! Sigh. So, forget SXSW.
Dr. Larry Weber, who worked on the PLATO plasma panel project at CERL back in the day, and who participated in the hardware session at the PLATO @ 50 conference (watch the video here), was one of thirteen individuals indicted into the Consumer Electronics Association's CE Hall of Fame 2010 class. Dr. Bitzer and Dr. Slottow, co-inventors of the plasma panel display, were already inducted into the CE Hall of Fame in 2006.
I've submitted a proposal to the SXSW 2011 Interactive Conference in Austin, TX. SXSW wrote back and said they loved the idea, but it seems like it's up to the world to vote for the session to make sure it gets added to the agenda.
The session is on NewsReport, which I argue is the world's first online newspaper (and perhaps blog). Certainly the earliest precursor to what we see commonplace today on the web, as far as I can tell. Should be a great session.
HOW YOU CAN HELP: You can help make this session come about by going to the link below and clicking on the thumbs up icon, indicating you're voting in favor of this session. Please vote, and spread the word via Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere! Thanks!
Today the New York Times ran two articles, plus a video, about efforts around the world to use robots as teaching machines, er, teachers. Somehow, this all rings a bell.
Be sure to watch the video, entitled "Robotic Teaching" in the first one:
Is nothing sacred? Apparently not, when it comes to names of people, places, and things from the PLATO era. Last year was the year that "Avatar" was wrenched from the clutches of PLATO gaming legend to become the biggest movie in history. And now, I find that not even Bruce Parrello's famous screen name, Red Sweater, is safe. No, there's a software company with that name:
I contacted the folks at Red Sweater, and they say they've never heard of PLATO let alone poor Mr. Parrello. And so it goes, another PLATO name gobbled up by the present day...
One mystery I've never been able to solve is: who went, in May 1974, to the Little Theatre in Sullivan, Illinois, where Leonard Nimoy -- Spock himself -- was starring in a regional stage performance of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest? I ask, because whoever it was who went down there, apparently went backstage, met Nimoy, and invited him up to the University of Illinois for a visit. And, what do you know, Nimoy agreed. And next thing you know, he is touring CERL.
Were you the person who invited Nimoy? Or, were you there the day he visited CERL? If I've not already interviewed you about this, please get in touch. I'd really like to get this story straight. Thanks!
Donald Bitzer was invited on The Phil Donahue Show twice to demonstrate PLATO. The first time was around 1978. I have a copy of that video. But I am still looking for a copy of the 1981 second show, for which I believe he was sole guest, and had the entire hour to demo PLATO. (The first show he had to share with an annoying fake robot named AROK that trivialized much of the rest of the show.)
If anyone has a VHS, Beta, DVD, or other recording of the second Donahue show, please let me know (email brian at platohistory dot org). Thanks!
The PLATO: A Culture of Innovation panel from the PLATO@50 conference, June 3, 2010. Featuring Don Bitzer, David Frankel, Tina Gunsalus, and Bob Price. Moderated by Bob Sutton. About 80 minutes long.
The Software Panel at the PLATO@50 conference featured Dr. Bob Rader, Dr. Bruce Sherwood, Mike Walker, and moderator Steve Gillmor. It's about 68 minutes long.
The PLATO@50 conference panel on Hardware Innovations featured Dr. Donald Bitzer, Dr. Roger Johnson, and Dr. Larry Weber. The Moderator was Philip McKinney. It's about 86 minutes long.
The Games Panel at the PLATO@50 conference featured John Markoff (Moderator), Bruce Artwick, John Daleske, Dr. Brand Fortner, Dr. Andrew Shapira, and Rich Hilleman. It's about 71 minutes long -- enjoy!
The Computer History Museum has uploaded another video from the PLATO@50 conference, late this afternoon -- the panel on Online Community. Featured are Charlene Li (Moderator), Dave Woolley, and Kim Mast, and Lili Cheng of Microsoft.
The Computer History Museum uploaded another high-definition video of a PLATO@50 panel session to YouTube today. This is the 1hr 9min video of the Online Education panel from June 3rd. It features an introduction by CHM CEO John Hollar, and a panel including Dr. Ruth Chabay, Dr. Sharon Dugdale, Bonnie Anderson Seiler, and Dr. Bruce Sherwood. The Moderator is Dr. Roy D. Pea:
You know that pile of computer tapes you have in the basement, or was it the attic? You know, the ones in those dusty old boxes that you stuffed away twenty or thirty or maybe even thirty-five years ago? The ones that contain backups of everything on the PLATO mainframe you worked on? Yeah, those tapes.
Could I borrow them?
I'm getting a lot of requests for tapes lately. I stopped asking for 'em long ago, but I guess the conference triggered interest in backup tapes again. If there's one thing I've learned over the years -- someone somewhere has tapes. Someone somewhere always has the pile of stuff you're looking for, be it tapes, brochures, articles, Kodachrome color slides, snapshots, movies, videos. It's out there somewhere.
I recently had dinner with some of the Cyber1.org folks and they were very interested in tapes too. They'd like to restore stuff on those tapes and get the lessons, notesfiles, whatever, onto cyber1.org. I'd love to see that too.
Stumbled on this oldie from the early 1970s. Written by Mike Carroll ("Hob"), Mike Folk ("Starry"), and Tom Stieglitz ("Condor"):
Twas the week before finals,
And on every term
The gamers were playing, making everyone squirm
The Cyber was clicking, the disks were a-spin
And the people in moonwar were trying to win
S-3's on remotes were blinking and flashing
(Every 5 minutes the system was crashing)
A new version here, and a new version there
Was enough to make even John Eisenberg swear
The Baron was BLEEPING at the raunched Comptech2
And Fuller was missing his space: fr2
Pad was in shambles, thanks to aero of glass
And everyone's heading for talko, en masse.
Poor John Daleske (as empire dies)
Is tearing his hair: tears in his eyes.
Meanwhile Pete Rowell and his friend Al McNeil
Are busily trying to make Nova look real
With cookies we authors, try Frankel to please
And Rick Blomme's beard is down to his knees.
He's being attacked, he's getting quite mad
But he's still the best friend the games ever had.
Then what to my wondering eyes should appear
But a sorrowful Sweater and a can of ROOT BEER.
"I'm hooked on my Fanta, I've given up hope...
The withdrawal is bad, like being on dope."
The author of pad, gandy, et al.
Will hopefully be back on the system next fall
(PLUG PLUG PLUG PLUG)
For those that we've missed (we know quite a few)
Check back in a month, when we write version 2.
Hob, Condor, Starry: We all need a rest.
We know this is poor, but we did do our best.
The technology website Punto Informatico has a writeup about PLATO's 50th anniversary. It's in italian. Here's a link to a rather bumpy machine translation to English via Google Translate.
For those unable to attend the conference, I thought you might be interested in this. One of the things we put together for attendees was a 24-page illustrated booklet summarizing the history and significance of PLATO.
The Computer History Museum has a relationship with the MagCloud service which lets anyone print their own magazines, and they've begun a series of computer history booklets at the MagCloud site. The PLATO@50 booklet is the second in this new series.
Click on either the above or below image to go to the MagCloud page to get details on the booklet and to find out how you can get a copy.
The booklet has a nice foreword by Donald Bitzer, has lots of great photos and PLATO screen shots in all their glorious orange pixels, and text written by yours truly. CHM did a really nice job on the design and layout too. Enjoy it!
One technical note: I was particularly pleased at how well some of the PLATO screen shots came out. I often hear print people and layout folks shudder at the notion of rendering 72-dots-per-inch screen grabs direct into print, as they usually want 150-dpi or even 300-dpi for print use, and 72-dpi seems to set PhotoShop gurus right off. But happily, the plain ol' 72-dpi TIFF screen grabs came out fine. Whatever magic they did to get them in the booklet worked.
The Computer History Museum had posted the first video of the entire evening of June 2, including introductory remarks by CHM CEO John Hollar, a 15-minute PLATO historical overview by yours truly, and then the conversation with Donald Bitzer, Ray Ozzie, and John Markoff. It's about 90 minutes total. Here it is:
The Reunion event starting around noon today was wonderful. A real surprise was the "PLATO @ 50" cake, which Don and Maryann Bitzer ceremoniously cut the first piece from.
Great to see so many folks, many for the first time.
Back now to frantic last-minute preparation for the conference program which kicks off tonight at 7pm sharp. See you there!
Since last November if not before then, I've been contacting people at Google regarding the idea of doing something like the following to celebrate the 50th anniversary of PLATO:
Would be hugely attention-grabbing, tens if not hundreds of millions would see it, and think of the good karma for Google to recognize the huge set of innovations that came decades before Larry and Sergey founded the company.
Month after month of trying different approaches to reach out to Google with the idea resulted in silence. Some Googlers suggested I write directly to Marissa Mayer, which I did last week. Heard back from her late last night (for many months I'd proposed that Google do the Doodle this week, not next, since it'd help boost awareness of next week's free conference at the Computer History Museum). She indicated this was the first she'd heard of it, but assumed it was now too late. So this morning I replied back to her and others at Google that, no, it's not too late at all -- any day between now and June 3 would be fine. No reply yet. Crossing fingers.
Google, if you're reading this, go for it. It would be completely awesome and in the long run you will see the wisdom in having acknowledged the PLATO team's work and rightful place in the pantheon of computer wizards that preceded Google and all the web companies in Silicon Valley.
Please help support this important project to document and archive the history of the PLATO computer system and its online community. Your support is appreciated!
