PLATO History

Donald Bitzer, Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson Inducted Into National Inventors Hall of Fame

2013-05-05T15:45:19Z

The event happened on May 1, 2013 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office's National Inventors Hall of Fame. From the Invent.Org website:

"In the mid-1960s, Don Bitzer and Gene Slottow, faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and graduate student Robert Willson, worked together to create the first plasma display. A new display was needed for the PLATO computerized learning system that had been created by Bitzer because traditional displays had no inherent memory, lacked high brightness and contrast, and flickered. Today, plasma displays are known for their accurate color reproduction, high contrast ratios, wide viewing angle and large screen refresh rates."

Here's a video Don recorded for the NIHF, answering the question about PLATO's relationship to NSF and its funding:

DND Interview with Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood

2013-01-27T00:54:11Z

I read about this on =pad= on NovaNET and wanted to share it here. Great interview conducted by Carey Martell of the "RPG Fanatic Show" on YouTube, with Gary and Ray talking all about creating "dnd", the first dungeon and dragon game on PLATO. Enjoy!

UPDATE: rayc/conn in the comments mentioned that there's more to the video and the interview --- additional info and extended interview q and a available here. Thanks Ray!

From Moonwar to Coursera in 40 years

2013-01-03T21:03:22Z

Longtime PLATO gamers may recall the famous big-board multiuser games like Moonwar, written around 1972 by then high-school student Louis A. Bloomfield in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Bloomfield was a serious gamer and game author and all-around PLATOholic during these years, who then went off to college in Amherst, Massachusetts but returned to work on PLATO during the summers. He later went off to Stanford to pursue a Ph.D. in Physics, and ultimately became a professor at the University of Virginia where he continues to work and teach to this day.

And in an interesting twist of history, he's now signed up to offer a class on Coursera, one of the so-called "MOOC" companies (Massive Open Online Courses) that's gotten so much media attention in the last year, to offer one of his longtime courses, "How Things Work", for free over the Internet. He's been offering this class for decades at the University of Virginia (students love him -- check out his great ratings at RateMyProfessors.com) and in case you don't know, he has a fantastic textbook out also called "How Things Work" (very expensive though!) but also a non-textbook edition which is equally fantastic, called "How Everything Works" (around $18 on Amazon), which explains all sorts of interesting stuff from elevators to washing machines to jet engines. He also has some really interesting physics and science videos on YouTube that are worth digging up, especially if you are a fan of shows like MythBusters.

This may be the first PLATO person to offer a Coursera course. We've come a long way. (Though, and this is an entire other discussion, it's an open question how truly effective Coursera's approach to "online courses" is compared to the best courses on PLATO.) I'm looking forward to hearing how well it does -- I have a hunch it's going to be a big hit.

UPDATE: another bit of news regarding Professor Bloomfield: an invention of his is gaining momentum. Here's a recent news article.

Ray Ozzie's New Talkomatic?

2012-12-03T23:36:37Z

I knew something sneaky was up with Ray. :-) Ever since the PLATO@50 Conference things seemed awful stealthy. As in, it was the *way* he wasn't talking that told me something was up. And then he leaves Microsoft, and then news comes out he's started a new secretive startup company called Cocomo, Inc. Something was up, and a disturbance in the force told me there was PLATO DNA in that there new startup.

Today comes word at the GigaOM news site and an article in Pando Daily that Cocomo, Inc.'s changing its name to Talko. Hmm, now where have we heard that before (here's Dave Woolley's 1994 article on Talkomatic).

PLATO's Talkomatic, also known as Talko, was the world's first chat room app, which Doug Brown and Dave Woolley wrote back in 1973 on the PLATO system. It was the tip of a social-computing iceberg that appeared on PLATO during an amazing twelve month period that saw the rise of multiplayer games, chat rooms, instant messaging, online newspapers, message boards, and email. All written by teens and twentysomethings, who would transform the way people thought about and used computers. They made PLATO the first real social computer. Forever more, people who used PLATO would emerge from the experience with a sense that computers were about connecting people together and letting them talk. This whole history will be covered in great detail in my upcoming book on the history of PLATO. In fact it's such an important part of the PLATO story that it takes up 1/3 of the entire volume.

But back to Ray and Talkomatic. It turns out in July 2012, Cocomo Inc quietly filed trademark registrations not only for Talko but for Talkomatic as well:

I also noticed that the domain "talkomatic.com" was grabbed a little over a month after the PLATO@50 conference. The "talk-o-matic.com" domain is also taken. Interestingly, those two plus "cocomo.com" and "ozzie.net" all use the same mysterious Wilmington, Delaware-based domain registrar. Coincidence?

Needless to say, I'm reaching out to Ray Ozzie, as well as Talkomatic's original authors Doug Brown and Dave Woolley to get their comments. If I hear anything I will update here.

UPDATE no. 1:

Here's the Talko article on TechCrunch. So are Ray and company just using the Talko/Talkomatic name as homage to PLATO, but not similar functionality? Unknown at this time.

UPDATE no. 2 (March 17, 2013):

More speculation from the TechCrunch people. They haven't done their homework; haven't made the PLATO connection yet. Story from TechCrunch 3/14/2013 here. GigaOM has an article out too and it's as clueless as TechCrunch's. One of these days...

Eugene Jarecki on The Daily Show

2012-10-17T17:02:27Z

Eugene Jarecki was the guest on The Daily Show last night with Jon Stewart. Born in Connecticut in 1969, and a Princeton graduate, is a successful filmmaker with a string of compelling, award-winning movies. His latest is the prison and drug war documentary The House I Live In which is getting excellent reviews.

He and his brothers are now all filmmakers, all successful. His brother Andrew was CEO and co-founder of MovieFone and has done a number of interesting, notable films, and Nicholas, who was born in 1979, just recently came out with the Richard Gere financial thriller Arbitrage which also got very good reviews.

But in terms of PLATO history, what's interesting is that the Jarecki family (the father is the psychologist and successful commodities investor Dr. Henry Jarecki) was one of the only families in the entire world to have a private PLATO terminal in their home during the early to mid-1970s. That made Eugene was one of the first kids in the world to grow up online in the sense we mean it today: in addition to access to countless hours of online courseware (he loved the Sentences lesson), he also had access to the notesfiles, chat rooms, instant messaging, and addictive multiplayer games, not to mention having the experience commonplace today of every day (if not every minute) something new, exciting, and distracting happening online. He got an early, and heavy, dose of what was coming decades later.

Even years later, Jarecki vividly remembered playing games on PLATO. "The addiction never goes away," Eugene told me in a 2003 interview for the book. "So I would always be happy to play Empire."

He was particularly fond of the orange glow that emanated from his family's PLATO terminal's flat-panel display. "The thing with the orange glow," he told me, "is it remains to this day the most pleasing color palette I've seen, that sort of weird cloudy screen? It's like dark, you honestly felt that behind that screen that there was miles of space." He's not the only one who felt that way.

PLATO Emoticons, revisited

2012-09-19T21:30:41Z

Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) just tweeted the following: "30 years ago today, scientist Scott Fahlman suggested the use of a colon, a hyphen, and a parenthesis to represent happy and sad faces." Right. Meanwhile, PLATO users had been doing emoticons for a full decade prior.

UPDATE: this week there are tons of news articles and digital media "reporters" writing articles celebrating the "30th birthday" of Internet ASCII emoticons, blithely ignoring the important and substantial usage of emoticons by thousands of PLATO users all through the 1970s.

I originally wrote the following text back in September 2002, but it is still as valid now as it was then, and considering all the news this month about the "30th anniversary of emoticons" I figured it was time to trot out some facts about PLATO's own history that goes back much further. So here again is my writeup on PLATO emoticons. in an edited form. Much more will be coming in my upcoming book.

The news is floating around the Web right now about the "discovery" of the first online emotion-conveying icon or "emoticon." What readers and reporters are apparently not aware of is that the emoticon or "smiley" being discussed is the first ASCII smiley. Compared to PLATO's emoticons, the ASCII ones were downright primitive, usually requiring you to turn your head sideways to "get" the joke.

Like so many things, PLATO was doing emoticons and smileys, online and onscreen, years earlier. In fact,emoticons on PLATO were already an art form by 1976. PLATO users began doing smiley characters probably as early as 1972 (when PLATO IV came out), but possibly even earlier on PLATO III (still to be determined... old-timer PLATO III users please speak up!).

A close-up of some famous PLATO emoticons. There were thousands.

How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space -- and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more -- in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters. So if you typed "W" then SHIFT-space then "O" then SHIFT-space then "B", "T", "A", "X", all with SHIFT-spaces in between, all those characters would plot on top of each other, and the result would be the smiley as shown above in the "WOBTAX" example.

Below are just some examples of smileys and emoticons collected from lesson =m4= on PLATO in the mid 1970s:

Emoticons were widely used on PLATO. You'd see people include them in messages, in chats (instant messaging was called TERM-talk and chat rooms were available in =talkomatic=). It was just part of the culture, once you started seeing someone posting them, you wanted to know how they did that; you learned, and then you started doing it too! The sideways-looking ASCII emoticons of other systems were primitive compared to what you saw on PLATO.

By the way, an interesting dissertation on emoticons and such was done by Janet Asteroff in 1987. The dissertation is called Paralanguage in Electronic Mail: A Case Study. It mentions the Scott Fahlman proposal. Alas, the dissertation never mentions PLATO...

Yet another PLATO innovation ignored, this time patented by Google

2011-03-22T15:41:36Z

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...

Here is another example I have blogged about in the past: Valentine's Day, 1975.

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.)

March 11, 1961: PLATO II demo, with timesharing and remote access

2011-03-11T20:43:49Z

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.

PLATO presentation accepted at upcoming SXSWi 2011 conference

2010-11-09T01:06:42Z

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.

Larry Weber Inducted into CEA's 2010 CE Hall of Fame

2010-10-20T23:02:23Z

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 inducted 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.

Congrats Larry!

For more on the story, here's a link to the CEA's own blog post.

Illinois Alumni magazine article on PLATO

2010-09-12T15:39:02Z

The September 2010 issue of Illinois Alumni magazine, the official publication of the University of Illinois Alumni Assocation, has an article about the history of PLATO entitled In The Time Of PLATO: How Students at Illinois Created Today's Computer Technology 50 Years Ago by Mary Timmins.

Mentioned in the article are Dan Alpert, Don Bitzer, Roger Johnson, Ray Ozzie, C.K. Gunsalus, Lippold Haken, and Paul Tenczar.

PLATO Talk at 2011 SXSW -- Please Vote!

2010-08-12T22:45:00Z

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!

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/5977

Robots in School: Same Wine, Different Bottle?

2010-07-12T01:32:06Z

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:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/11robotside.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/11robots.html

What's your take on this? I'm deeply conflicted.

The Appropriations of PLATO Names Continue...

2010-07-10T03:56:10Z

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...

Who Went to the Sullivan Theatre?

2010-07-03T16:50:12Z

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!