Discovering the birthplace of social networks: PLATO

So who are you? So I'm Brian Deer, and I'm organizer of a conference at the Computer history museum this June 2nd and 3rd, called the Plato at 50 conference. And it's celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Plato Plato system, which is, I would argue, among many other things, the birthplace of social media. And that, in a nutshell, is, you know, a rather provocative, you know, statement, you know, for a lot of folks who are like, you know, experts or pundits in social media. And they go, I've never heard of it. Well, that may be the case, but it is the case that, you know, come to the conference and find out. You know, I've assembled together with a crew at the Computer History Museum and folks from the University of Illinois who were Plato people back in the 70s and even earlier, who got his start in computing as a student at the University of Illinois on the PLATO system and used Plato Notes, which was the conferencing system, and then went off 10 years later and did Lotus Notes, which you might have heard of, which was very much inspired by the sort of online collaborative culture that he had seen on Plato and wasn't seeing with the PC revolution and thought, gosh, you know, what is plato? So PLATO is, first of all, it's an acronym, P L A T O stands for a really wonderful defense contractor kind of thing. It stands for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations. And it was funded by ARPA, NSF, DoD, Office of Education, the Johnson Administration, Nixon Administration, Basically the same money that poured into ARPANET poured into Plato. And what's, you know, I recently fired off an email to, on a mailing list, the Internet history mailing list, where Vint Cerf and a bunch of the original arpnet people hang out and they talk about who did TELNET and RFC stuff and all that. And I asked them, okay, so during like the period 72 to 82, what was the general population, as it were, or the census of arpanet, the early Internet? Because my hunch is that Plato was way bigger. And what was interesting is that they have records, they have record books of not only counts of people, but who the individuals were. The community was still roughly about 10,000 and, you know, probably 75 or so. It was way less than that. It grew quickly, you know, and these.

Are probably mostly people working at research labs.

Exactly. It was a pretty closed kind of thing, whereas on Plato, you know, it was far more open. This was a system that the mission of Plato was education. But what's really phenomenal about it Is that the sort of the early hacker culture that discovered this incredible system starting around 1972, discovered, you know, this was the greatest thing since AIR to build social software. They didn't call it that at the time. They didn't know. I mean they were literally building the precursors to instant messaging. The first multi user chat room was called Talk O Matic, which was a huge hit circa 1973. And you know, just to give you an example, I mean what's been fascinating, I'm writing a book on the history of Plato as well as doing this conference and just discovering that the phenomena that we've all read about in the newspapers and online over the last 10 years, you know about say people entering a chat room and adopting a false identity or if you're a guy appearing as a girl just as a joke and fooling everybody and everything. Every one of those kind of incidents happened in Talk o Matic in 1973 and forward and over and over and over again. When you look at the early examples of this, of the apps that were on Plato, you see the same social behaviors that we've all read about, been shocked about, laughed about, whatever all these years later. Another classic example is starting around 78, 79, there was a virtual economy of virtual goods that people would pay real cash sometimes like you know, 100 bucks or 200 bucks for spells and gold and weapons and you know, a better user level in Moria or Avatar or one of the great games on Plato. Another whole dimension to Plato which we're going to be talking about. One of the things we're talking about at the conference is games. And one of the co authors of Avatar, you know, this is 30, 40 years before the movie came out, but we'll be there. And Bruce, the guy from Sublogic who did Microsoft Flight Simmons, Bruce Hartwick will be on the panel. He didn't write for Plato, but Flight Simulator was inspired by Air Fight, which was another killer game on Play doh, written by Brand Fortner and Brand is on the panel as well.

If you saw the early flight simulators I visited with the team when I worked with it at Microsoft. If you play with the early ones, it looks nothing like today. Oh no, just barely a few lines on screen.

Oh yeah, but see, Will Wright, the author of SimCity and stuff like that and Spore more recently has often talked about this in lectures where one of the. One of the. And he was talking about it from a standpoint of early computer games and mostly video games. But it's the same is true with plato In the 70s, you know, animation was measured in seconds per frame, not frames per second, first of all. So, you know, you couldn't count on, you were not going to get anything close to photo realism. You didn't have color. And on Plato it was monochrome, most typically in orange pixels on a black background, which was a gas plasma flat panel display, 512 by 512 graphics, which was higher res than the original Macintosh actually. But nevertheless, the notion of imagination versus technology and the limits of technology, you place a lot as a game player. You would place a lot more emphasis, whether you knew it or not, on imagination. And that made the game as incredibly vivid as if you were in a first person shooter playing on a Wii or a PlayStation. Now, it didn't matter. And games like Empire, people would play for 10, 12, 24 hours straight on through, you know, in a frantic, fast paced game that, you know, you look at it now and it kind of looks quaint, but it was nothing. But, I mean, you could rip a keyboard apart by pounding at it for literally. You know, one of the great things about Plato is it was designed for education. So everything was designed to deliver, you know, courseware and that kind of stuff, teachers, students, everything from elementary math to advanced physics. But one of the core principles from the designers of Plato was keep the thing fast and responsive at the keyboard. So if you typed abc, those characters went all the way out over the phone lines to the cyber mainframe and back to you in less than a tenth of a second or minimum tenth of a second.

So were you on the system?

I started using Play Doh at the University of Delaware in 1979.

Is that what got you into it?

I had used some Micros. We had a Wang 2200A at my high school in the 70s. But when I saw Plato, I was just astonished. I mean, I had no idea. My experience up to then had been, well, you know, you use a computer to crunch numbers. You know, it's not that really compelling. You can, you know, maybe games and stuff like that, but you get on Plato and suddenly you realize you are, you belong to a community. It was my first experience with basically a really rich social scene on a computer. And, you know, Plato really is the first classic example of an online community. You know, there's been a lot of talk lately about what happened to it because, well, I mean, first of all, those gas plasma displays cost $5,000, so the terminals cost $5,000. Control Data Corporation marketed Plato, but if you wanted to buy a Play Doh system and you were like a corporation or university, it might set you back five, $10 million and then several million per year for the licenses to use the software and the courseware and everything. So it was immensely expensive. And remember, AT&T controlled the telecommunications back then. So you paid Ma Bell pretty high fees for every phone line. So it was a very, very expensive proposition. And then suddenly Apple IIS and Commodores and PCs are coming out all over the place.

That's why I missed it, because that's when I came into the world, right? I was in junior high when the.

Apple II came out, right? And I just remember when the Apple II came out and then the Apple III and, and the Lisa and the Mac and all that and the IBM PC and I was thinking, gosh, you know, these things are just so. They're islands where everyone is on their own desert island. They're not interconnected. Sure, you can now do spreadsheets. And there was early word processing and some games and stuff, or you could sit there and write BASIC or something. But compared to, you know, the Play Doh experience, which was, you know, 25, 30 years ahead of everybody and you know, where you would get online and ask questions, help people, get help from people just like you do nowadays. Completely naturally, that's the way Plato was. It was exactly what we have now. However, it was just, it was so early and it was so expensive that it was very, very limited to certain markets and certain institutions. And it could not compete with the Micros and also Control Data was very reluctant to move away from its very formally profitable mainframe business. And so even well into the 1980s, they were trying to sell mainframes and you know, if you wanted Plato, you know, please buy a mainframe system. And you know, that just did not. With the rate of the scale of the PC revolution and then the Net that was coming after it, there really wasn't any way to compete with that. One thing I might add though, is at the conference we're going to have about a dozen fully restored original PLATO terminals connected to essentially a fully functioning replica of a PLATO system with all the games and the courseware and everything from the University of Illinois circa mid-70s. And the system, actually that system has been up since 74. And I was just on it last night and there were a whole bunch of people playing Empire, which is Empire, by the way, is, you know, the great legendary Star Trek inspired space war game. 30 simultaneous users. And you know, there just. There really wouldn't have been anything like it until probably the 90s, but it's really crazy.

So what day is the conference?

Conference is June 2nd and 3rd. The way we're doing it is around 6pm There'll be a reception and cocktails and everything. And then I'm going to give a talk. The CEO of the Computer History Museum is going to give a little talk. And then Ray Ozzie and Don Bitzer, Don being the founder of Plato, are going to get up on stage and have a conversation that's moderated by John Markoff of the New York Times. And that should be a lot of fun. On the one hand, you have don, who's now 76 and just a brilliant, an engineer's engineer. He's won every distinguished award you can possibly win, except for the Nobel of engineering, which I don't think they have. But he won an EMMY Award in 2002 for the gas plasma display. And even the newspapers were going in 1967, Gosh, this is the future of television. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, this is. We're building this for education. And he was proven wrong. And he laughs about it now, but. And there will be several other people on the hardware panel talking about how PLATO terminals had these flat panel displays, which inspired Alan Kay, by the way, with the Dynabook. He saw a prototype of the PLATO.

Display, the iPad, basically.

Right. It's funny how it all comes, you know, I mean, I think Apple has spent the last three years, 30 years trying to reach, trying to make Alan Kay happy. You know, is this worthy of, you know, anyway.

So why should the Facebook generation care about history, of something that doesn't matter to today's world, it seems like.

Well, I mean, I think for one reason is. First of all, there were an awful lot of lessons learned back in that era with that system. And many of the things that happen on Plato have happened on the Net. I think, you know, there are still some issues that, you know, that we saw in Plato that are playing themselves out now. I don't know. I think one thing that it has become so easy to do a startup now. You talk about it all the time. I live the startup life too. And we've both seen in the last five, 10 years how you basically don't need anything anymore. In fact, you don't really need venture capital money. I mean, a little angel money is really all you need to get started. And the VCs will be the first ones to tell you that. And you've got the cloud, you don't need offices. You can be virtual. So A lot of people, including young people, are doing startups. But one of the things that when you dive into these things, these new ventures, and you don't have any context or understanding of the lessons that have been learned for many years in a lot of this area, what works, what doesn't work? One of the things that we learned really early on Plato, we had kind of the luxury of not having scale, the scale that we've seen with the Internet. Now that we're at scale, some things don't work as well as they would have worked on Plato. Arguably, Facebook, yes, 400 million users. But it's not 400 million users all interacting with each other. It's 400 million users off on little islands and little networks of their own. You know, the famous social graph. Plato was a social graph. It was, you know, one node and everyone was connected to it. And so that was a little different. But just the fact that so much of what we take for granted in everything from computer games to social software to conferencing systems originates from Plato. And there was a lot of really good thinking about user experience and user interface design back in those days, principles that still stand today and that we keep violating, you know, in this rush for realism, I would argue, you know, realism for realism's sake. You see it on the iPad, for example, with the ibook. You know, you turn the page and it turns with you and all that stuff, which is, you know, cool and everything. But is that. Do we really need that? That's a whole other discussion we could have. But so, yeah, there are a lot of interesting lessons learned, and we'll be going into them in depth at the conference. You know, the panels range from, you know, talking about how Plato was used as an educational system versus, you know, what we see in education today. And what's really interesting there is there were amazing insights and developments on Plato that have never been replicated since Mike. Right. Well, for example, I mean, you hear about. You probably have seen this. I mean, you go to itunes, for example, and you can go to their online courseware, you know, free courseware, you know, mit and what they basically are videos of professors giving lectures. Now, that's a wonderful resource. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I think it's incredible, and I wish I had more time to spend, you know, soaking that stuff up. But they're just videos. It's a completely passive medium. It's very easy to distribute and everything. There was a lot of hard work that went into real interactive lessons on Plato, where it was Designed for very individualized instruction. So it would know how well you are doing and it would remember you the next time you sat down and used it, whatever terminal you might be at. And it would evaluate you, grade you and all that kind of stuff. You would know how well what your progress is, and that would be fed to the teacher and all that stuff. And it was part of your grade and all that. You don't get that by just sitting down and watching a video. You either watch it or you don't, but there's no interaction. It's a lot harder to do interaction. And, you know, National Science foundation spent millions of dollars with the University of Illinois to develop, you know, whole curricula, you know, incredible. For example, math and reading lessons for kids, many of which, some of a lot of those lessons are still in use today. The PLATO system actually never really died. It just broke off in lots of different interesting ways. But there is a system called NovaNet, for example, which basically is still the PLATO system from the University of Illinois. And it's still up and running. It typically has, I think, 10 to 13,000 simultaneous users on during the day. And hundreds of thousands of students around the country use that system mostly for remedial education in a high school level and that kind of thing. It's all, you know, so it's still happening, you know, but a lot of the stuff that you see nowadays, even if it looks slicker and is high resolution and all that stuff, doesn't have the thinking and the hard work that went into a lot of the work that was done on Plato 30, 40 years ago. Yeah.

You're streaming this conference?

Well, I'm. We're going to have a camera crew, an HD crew that's going to be, worst case, recording the whole thing for later streaming. But I'm planning to get you streaming up and running, and I'm looking into that this week. It's one of the reasons I'm up in the area to meet with the museum and talk about ustream. So, yeah, yeah, I mean, you can't get better than free. It's a free conference too, so. Oh, it's a free. It's a totally free conference. I mean, how many tech conferences have you been to that are totally free?

Not to me.

You know, it would not happen without Microsoft support. Ray Ozzie is a huge supporter of Plato and that has. And Plato Learning is another company that's a sponsor. I mean, they're, they're the ones who have made it happen when it comes to a free conference. And I've never done a conference before, but sponsors, gosh, they really are important. Now I understand why they spend time thanking the sponsors at the beginning of the opening session of the conference. Because oftentimes it's why everyone's there. They may not realize it, so that ought to be fun.

Where can I learn more about the conference?

Go to platohistory.org or go to the computerhistory.org website to register. There's a calendar of events on the computerhistory.org site, and that's where you can actually register. It's free. They just want to know how many lunches to make and that kind of thing. And the PLATO history site that I run is a combination of blog and information about the conference. And over time, it's going to be a repository for archive material, like videos and documents and interview transcripts. I've interviewed about 500 people over the last too many decades for the book I'm writing, and so a lot of info about the book is going to be on that site, too. Very cool.

Well, I'm looking forward to the book and the conference.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Excellent. We.