[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: Welcome to
Talks at Kirkland.
I'd like to welcome Brian Dear.
He's the author of the book,
"The Friendly Orange Glow,"
and the book was
the first-- it is
the first to tell the
story of the PLATO
system and its relation to
the dawn of cyberculture.
Before becoming an
author, Mr. Dear
was the founder and the chairman
of Eventful Incorporated,
the makers of evenful.com, the
world's largest event search
engine.
He was also the
founding director
of eBay, design labs at eBay.
And he's also been in management
at Eazel, MP3.com, FlatWorks,
RealNetworks, and
Coconut Computing.
And he actually owns the domain
coconut.com, I found out.
So let's welcome Mr. Brian Dear.
So thanks for coming.
BRIAN DEAR: Thanks.
SPEAKER: So if this is
the first historical work,
I'm assuming that
a lot of people
don't even know what Plato is.
So do you mind giving
us an overview?
BRIAN DEAR: Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, it is remarkable that
it is so largely unknown.
I mean, it was a pretty
major government project.
It was funded by the same
agencies that funded ARPANET.
And any takers?
ARPANET?
ARPANET?
ARPA and NSF were the
major backers of PLATO.
The P-L-A-T-O stands for
Programmed Logic for Automatic
Teaching Operations.
A real tongue twister.
The project started in 1960
at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign.
And the idea was to--
you have to understand
that this was right after--
let's see.
It would have been three years,
basically two and 1/2 years
after Sputnik got launched
by the Soviet Union.
And that kind of freaked
out the US government,
and it freaked out the
media, and it freaked out
a lot of politicians,
that the US
was weak in science and math
and engineering education.
Because clearly,
the Soviets beat us
to launch a rocket into space.
And so what are we
going to do about this.
And suddenly, there
was this massive flow
of funding out of the
Congress, starting in 1958.
At the same time, NASA was
started, and ARPA was started.
And tons of funding started
flowing into universities
and companies to do something
about improving what we would
call STEM education today.
And the University
of Illinois had
a lab that had been set up
during the Korean War called
the coordinated science lab.
Actually, at the time, it was
called the Control Systems Lab.
They renamed it Coordinated
Science Lab, keeping the CSL,
so the US government would
have no trouble continuing
to write checks.
But they were
trying to move away
from being a military
classified lab doing
mainly research on radar
systems and air traffic control.
Very similar to the radiation
lab at MIT that some of you
may have heard of
from World War II.
There's lots of books
on the history of that.
So anyway, Plato emerged
with the idea, like, could
we do a civilian project
to apply a computer
to be a teacher and
instruct students who
sit down in front of it
under any academic subject.
And it's pretty remarkable that
they were doing this in 1960,
only a few years
after psychologist BF
Skinner at Harvard was
kicking around ideas
with teaching machines.
And the first chapter of my book
is all about what he was up to
and how his timing
was really good.
Because when Sputnik
arrived, suddenly everyone
looked at teaching
machines and what
was called programmed
instruction,
as maybe a new
way to really help
educate a lot more
people, because there
weren't enough teachers,
and that kind of thing.
So PLATO started as a
pure educational project
to turn a computer,
which at the time
was the ILLIAC which was one
of the big, old vacuum-tube
monoliths from the '50s,
when there were only
a handful of computers
in the world.
And it would fit in
this room, but it
was all vacuum--
thousands of vacuum tubes
that failed in a week, or
something like that, each.
So you were constantly
replacing it.
Yeah.
So that's what PLATO
originally was.
What makes the story interesting
is what it became later.
And I argue it kind
of became a precursor
to much of what we take for
granted today on the net,
a lot before people
realized was possible.
SPEAKER: Right.
So my next question
was about the first
that PLATO brought about.
Reading the first
part of your book,
you talk about a lot of
technological firsts,
with the touch screens, and
the plasma displays and such,
and then you move into
social and human interaction
changes in the
first, where you get
into this agriculture and the
social networks and things that
evolved.
Maybe we'll start the beginning
with the technological changes
and just what were some things
that PLATO was on the cutting
edge and the defining edge of.
BRIAN DEAR: Well, it was
way before cutting edge.
It was like, bleeding edge.
Rough, blunt edge.
It was-- I mean, they had to
basically build and construct
everything from scratch,
both software and hardware.
They had an ILLIAC box
the size of this room.
They didn't have any terminals.
They didn't have any graphics.
They didn't have any memory.
They had no telecom
capability, no networking.
They had no software.
Everything was machine code.
Really, really primitive.
Just maybe one notch
up from zeros and ones,
but it wasn't even
assembly language.
And that's what you
programmed the ILLIAC in.
And so that's
where they started.
And one of the things
they realized right away
was, if you're going
to teach students,
you need to have a
graphical display.
They understood that.
They had been exposed to
projects like SAGE, which
was a gigantic
military project that
involved real graphical
displays that had been
built for billions of dollars.
So the technology was known,
it was just insanely expensive
and not practical.
And just to give you guys an
idea of the cost, compared to--
we now have-- even
one person holding
a smartphone in this room has
more memory than all computers
combined in the world, probably
until the '70s, I'm guessing.
You know the 16 gig, right?
When PLATO started, one
idea was for the display,
they would use
video RAM and a CRT.
And so they went
off and bought a--
they found a used $10 television
set that the tuner was broken.
But hey, it was a
CRT, and it worked,
so that's all they needed.
They didn't need the tuner.
And then they were trying to
figure out how to do memory.
And RAM, in 1960, '61,
'62, was $2 per bit.
So do the math on your
16 gig phone, right?
Or 64, 128 gig phone.
We're talking a couple
hundred million dollars.
So even then, to have a 512
by 512 pixel display, which
is what the idea
was, it was going
to cost hundreds and hundreds
of thousands of dollars.
And just for students in schools
that when teachers can't even
afford chalk to put
on the blackboard,
it just was not going to--
the economics weren't there.
So they had to come up
with something else.
And what they came up with was
an idea that actually had been
kicked around for
quite a while, it
turned out, of using gaseous
discharge, gas plasma discharge
in an-- if you built an array
of conductors, one going
vertically, one
going horizontally,
and you ran electricity
through any intersection
of the conductors, in theory,
you could basically light up
one little cell that had neon
gas or some other kind of gas
in it.
And the holy grail
was can you make
that gaseous cell have memory.
And it would have--
essentially, you could
set it in such a state
that it would stay lit.
And if you could do
that, then you basically
have a memory cell, and
it would be a lot cheaper
than RAM and stuff like that.
So they worked on
that for years.
And they tried
everything they could do.
They wound up with a
breakthrough in 1964--
and I talk about
that in the book--
where they finally-- build
a single-pixel display.
That's all they had.
They were using--
if as a kid you
remember if you ever
played with a microscope,
and you know the little
square pieces of glass
that you put on top of
a slide in a microscope,
and then you look at some
parameciums or something?
Those little, tiny,
thin wafers of glass,
they created a sandwich of them.
And so there were
three sheets of glass.
The one inside had a little
dot drilled through it,
and that was the pixel.
And they managed to
get neon gas into it.
And normally neon gas glows
orange, just like a camp fire.
But some nitrogen
from just normal air
had leaked into the
tube, and it glowed blue.
But that was their breakthrough.
And it actually-- if you send
a certain amount of electricity
through, a spike in the
signal, and then you
send a smaller sustaining
voltage through,
the pixel will stay lit.
And that is literally a one.
And you can send a
drop in the voltage,
and the pixel will go
off, and that's zero.
But they had achieved
memory in a display.
So by 1972, they had
512 by 512 versions
of these with orange pixels.
And literally, when
you're sitting down
at one of these screens,
you are viewing the memory.
There is no RAM that it's
refreshing constantly,
like 60 Hertz or something.
You're looking at the memory.
So it was a pretty
ingenious invention.
And they also realized, if we
had three pixels per pixel,
and we used different color
phosphorus, we could have RGB,
and we could have color.
And so they actually
put that in a patent.
So they invented
plasma televisions.
And it turned out to be a
really lucrative patent that
poured millions of dollars
into the University of Illinois
and helped fund PLATO
for many, many years.
Lots of companies; Fujitsu,
IBM, NCR, all kinds of companies
would license that patent.
And plasma displays
wound up in everything
from checkout counters
at the grocery store
to airline ticket
counters and banks
and nuclear submarines
wanted flat-panel displays,
because the CRTs took
up too much room.
So it wound up everywhere.
SPEAKER: Awesome.
And so the book's
"The Friendly Orange
Glow," when did PLATO switch
over to the RGB display?
Or did it ever?
BRIAN DEAR: No.
Because it was
just too expensive.
And in fact, there
were prototypes.
They had colored
displays in the lab.
I remember seeing
one in the '80s.
IBM built one.
They built a 1024
by 1024, I think
it was, plasma color display.
But it would have cost
$100,000 or something,
so it wasn't practical.
It was only when Fujitsu came
out with the 42 inch plasma
vision, like in the
mid '90s or something.
That was the first
plasma television
that you could buy
and hang on the wall,
and it would only set you
back about $15,000, you know?
They became dirt
cheap over time.
SPEAKER: Amazing.
So technologically, it's,
like you said, bleeding edge.
But then it started
as a teaching system,
and then you said it
evolved to something else.
More of a network system
so let's talk about that.
BRIAN DEAR: Well, they always
had this dream of scaling
the system up.
I mean, it's kind of funny
when you look back at project--
you hear about scale
in any startup today.
Right?
I mean, the whole dream
is you build a product,
you build a service, and
you've got to scale it up.
And you throw it into the
cloud, some cloud service.
And you have virtual servers.
And it's all--
people nowadays don't
realize how good they have
it compared to what they
were dealing with in PLATO.
I mean, one of the
jokes in the PLATO era,
I heard this from people all the
time when I interviewed them,
was every bit is sacred.
And when you were coding
a program on PLATO,
you might get about
1,000 words of memory.
And so you literally
had to worry
about allocating and assigning
real meaning to a single bit
rather than, oh, just a long
to a binary value or something.
You did not have that luxury.
It's kind of funny.
I think Microsoft Word probably
exceeded the entire Cyber
OS, all of PLATO, all of its
programs, all of its data
and everything, and
footprint, in terms of data,
probably years ago.
Any big app nowadays is kind
of bloated compared to what
the PLATO people were facing.
Everything was scarce.
And every single
aspect of the system,
you really had to
think carefully,
because there just wasn't--
there wasn't the luxury
of resources we have now.
SPEAKER: And you said
Cyber is the operating
system it ran under?
BRIAN DEAR: Well, yeah.
What happened was Plato started
with the ILLIAC computer, which
was completely inadequate.
And all the other professors
and researchers on campus
were also using that
thing, which means
you had to sign up for time.
It wasn't a time-sharing system.
So you might get 2 AM
or something like that.
And the way you
programmed the ILLIAC
is that you worked on paper
for days or maybe even weeks
beforehand, and your
time on the ILLIAC
was actually trying to
compile that program,
and it better work.
Because if it didn't,
you had probably
blown the hour that you had.
And so you'd have to go
back through the equivalent
of core dumps, I guess,
and try to figure out
where there was a bug.
And then the next time,
maybe a week later
or something like that,
you might get another 2 AM
session to run it again.
So is insanely inadequate as
a development environment.
So CSL put out bids
for a better computer.
And IBM and Control Data both
came in with RFPs or whatever.
Control Data came in
with a $995,000 CDC 1604,
which at the time was
a pretty fast machine.
IBM came in with one of
its big, iron machines
for about a million dollars.
When they saw that CDC was
like $5 less, they said, OK.
We'll sell it to
you for $500,000.
Control Data came back
and told the university,
ours is $995,000, firm.
So IBM came back and said, we'll
sell it to you for $250,000.
And Control Data came
back and said, no, ours
is still $995,000.
Long story short, the
University of Illinois
bought the Control Data
machine for $995,000.
IBM was furious, sued, and
did all the typical stuff
that companies do.
Wound up in a huge battle
in the state legislature.
You When all the dust settled,
IBM went off very upset,
and Control Data got the deal.
And that kind of changed
the whole history of PLATO
from then on.
Because the first thing they
did was build an ILLIAC emulator
in the 1604.
So they were back to
running ILLIAC again,
but it was all emulated,
and it was much faster.
And they had time.
And then they started
annoying all the professors
around campus yet
again, because PLATO
was starting to consume
way too much of its time.
And so in a couple of years,
they got a second 1604 for $1.
And that really sealed
the fate of PLATO.
Because from then
on, they basically
had a relationship
with Control Data.
That was the architecture
for the rest of time.
And by the early
'70s, they had always
had this dream of scale,
to get up to thousands
of simultaneous users.
By then, CDC had a
real supercomputer,
the Cyber 6400, 6600 series.
Massive mainframes.
Very big.
Multimillion dollar machines.
And they bought one for PLATO.
And that's what PLATO started
running on around '71, '72.
And that's when
things got weird.
Because by then, the lab
had gotten much bigger.
There was a huge
influx of people.
And this lab was very unusual.
And I don't think they were--
I'm not aware of another
lab in the '70s, a computer
lab on a university campus
in the United States
that would have been
similar to this.
Every other one I've heard of,
MIT, Stanford, or whatever,
they were pretty
locked down places,
and you had to have
access to get in.
And so they were limited.
And you didn't have a
bunch of kids coming in
from the local high schools,
wandering into the building.
If you tried to do that,
you'd probably get kicked out,
and your parents would
probably get called.
That kind of thing.
But at the University of
Illinois at the PLATO lab,
they encouraged
people to wander in.
And there just happened to be a
high school across the street.
And sure enough, all the
geeks from that school
just wandered into PLATO, saw
these incredibly amazing 512
by 512 graphics displays, had
built-in touchscreens on them.
And people were
doing amazing things
with graphics in '72 and '73.
And they were not
getting kicked out.
In fact, they were encouraged to
sit down and start programming.
So a lot of them
learned how to code.
And starting around 1973,
there was this amazing 12 month
period where the whole PLATO
system really completely
changed in nature.
It had been all about education.
The kids-- ironically,
the recipients
of the education they were
supposed to get out of PLATO
took one look at it and saw
that the development environment
and realized, we could
do other kinds of things
with this, including
interterminal kinds of things,
including interpersonal
kinds of things.
So chat rooms started up.
There was an app
called Talkamatic.
Instant messaging fired
up in December of '73.
Email and what were
called Notes Files,
which are the equivalent of
message boards and message
forums, usenet and
that kind of thing.
All those things started.
There was an online newspaper.
And then there was a whole raft
of nonstop games being built.
And these were all multiplayer,
multi-user games, MUDS
and dungeon games.
They were all graphical.
And all this started
by the teenagers
from the high schools
and undergrads.
It was never part of the
National Science Foundation
mission to build all this
recreational social stuff,
but what struck me-- and it
only struck me after I finished
writing the book--
was that if you look
at this history that's
laid out of this
project, and you
see what they built so
early, you realize that the--
I describe it as the
interpersonal computer
revolution started before
the personal computer
revolution ever started.
Before Apple was incorporated,
before the Altair was out.
I think certainly before
Microsoft was incorporated.
I'll put it another way.
While Larry and Sergey
were still in diapers,
PLATO was booming with
this online culture
that had all the kind of apps
that got people addicted.
And they were having the
dopamine rush in 1973
that we hear talked about
today with social networks.
You know, Twitter,
Facebook, and Google+.
You know.
It's just remarkable because
there is no computer history
book.
There's no museum that
has a timeline that
shows that all this
advanced stuff was going on
really early, then it kind of--
and it didn't
really even die off.
It just was a parallel
universe, almost,
that very strangely got ignored.
And how many of
you, show of hands,
have ever heard of
the book, "Hackers,
Heroes of the Computer
Revolution" by Steve Levy?
Good.
Well, those who haven't, get it.
It's worth it.
It's a great book.
It's a great story.
It came out in 1984.
It's still in print.
I think O'Reilly
has a print out now.
It's what inspired
me to do this book.
Because I always felt--
The first thing I did
when I bought that was I
rushed to open the index
and look under P for PLATO.
Nada.
And that's been the way
it's been ever since.
Even Walt Isaacson's recent
book, "The Innovators,"
doesn't have a single
mention of PLATO in it,
which is absolutely remarkable.
But then at the--
so on the one hand,
I'm kind of frustrated,
and I wonder rant at them for
why didn't you blah, blah,
blah, but on the other hand,
what resources did they
have to even know about Plato?
If you didn't know someone, or
if you didn't use it yourself,
it really was a
you-had-to-be-there kind
of thing, which is
really unfortunate.
I mean, probably--
I'm assuming none of us
here were at Xerox PARC,
but we probably mostly
know about that history.
It's been well-documented.
There's been great
books about it.
And it profoundly
influenced the industry.
The lease on the Macintosh and
Windows and all that stuff.
And there's been great
books about that,
but there's never been
a book about PLATO.
So I always felt that
it was desperately
needed so that we can get
PLATO into the conversation
and no longer live in a world
that's kind of ignorant of it,
because it's pretty remarkable.
SPEAKER: So you have a passion
for it and an interest in it,
and there's no books about it.
So you had to
discover it somewhere.
So what-- how did
you meet PLATO?
BRIAN DEAR: Well, I come from
five generations of newspaper
publishers and editors.
My father's father, his father's
father, his father's father,
going back to like
1850, they own
the "Jersey City Journal," which
was the second largest paper
in the New York Metro area.
I think it's still around.
But anyway, so I grew
up in a household
of like 10 daily newspapers.
My hands were always
black from the ink.
I loved reading newspapers.
I was a Watergate
junkie as a kid.
And so I entered the
University of Delaware
as a freshman in
1979 with the idea,
I guess I'll be
English/Journalism and maybe go
work in a newspaper.
That was the family business.
And I was wandering
around campus,
literally the first
week I was there,
I'm walking through
the music building.
And there was a room
that I just-- you
know how in a lot of
university classrooms,
there will be a door to
the classroom entrance,
but then there's a glass
window floor to ceiling,
and you can look in, right?
Well, the lights were
off in this room,
but I saw that
all of these faces
were in there, sitting down at
terminals with their headphones
on, and they were all
reaching out and touching
the screen like that.
And I'm looking at it,
and there's very crisp,
high-resolution graphics
depiction of musical notation,
and then there's a keyboard,
like a piano keyboard,
at the bottom of the screen,
and they're all interacting.
They're clearly listening to
the music they're playing.
I was pretty impressed.
Because I thought
'70s computing was
like scrolling ASCII or
V2100 if you're lucky.
So I went in, and they
didn't kick me out.
So I checked it out.
There was a big poster on the
wall saying welcome to PLATO.
I had no idea what it was.
And I found out real fast.
I mean, I sat down, and
within a few minutes, I hear--
someone's cracking up
laughing at another terminal.
And I wasn't used to the
idea that people would laugh
at something on a computer.
And they were chatting
with somebody.
And then someone else was
reading a hilarious message
that someone had posted,
one of the Notes files.
And then it dawned
on me that they
weren't all there learning.
A lot of them were
interacting with people
on the other side of the screen,
somewhere else on the campus,
or--
I didn't know how
far this extended.
There were other people out
there using terminals too.
And then it dawned on me
that University of Delaware
was kind of like
this remote island.
It wasn't the cool place that--
the cool place
was the University
of Illinois, which was
where PLATO had started.
And then I discovered
that the Delaware PLATO
system was connected, kind of
like a poor man's internet.
It had a dedicated link
to a controlled data PLATO
system in Minneapolis,
which connected to Illinois,
and then there
were other systems
around the world in Canada,
and Europe, all the way down
to South Africa.
And most of them
were interconnected,
and you could send
email to anybody.
And that just kind
of blew me away.
So yeah.
The degree in English/Journalism
lasted about a week.
And then it was pretty much a
degree in PLATO since then, so.
SPEAKER: So at the time when
you met PLATO or first started
using PLATO, then it was already
a worldwide network as far as
[INAUDIBLE].
BRIAN DEAR: Oh yeah.
I mean, I had nothing to
do with building the system
or anything.
I was just a user.
And I just couldn't believe
that this thing was so cool.
And what it also did
was completely spoil me
from the micro-computer
revolution,
which was raging at the time.
Apple II was out.
Commodore PET had come out.
I guess the TRS-80, or
whatever it was called,
from Radio Shack, and then
the IBM PC came out in '81.
The Lisa came out a few years
later, and then the Mac.
And I looked at all
this stuff, and I
was like, why would
anyone want to sit down
at a lonely, disconnected,
kind of toy computer?
There's no people in that box.
There's no way to chat and
interconnect with them.
There's nothing
addictive about it.
And yet they were
all addicted to PCs.
And I'm like, but look at this.
This is PLATO.
It's much more interesting.
This is the future.
That's like, bah.
Future.
People.
The people is the killer app.
You know?
I think PLATO people
understood that from day one.
And I arrived late on the scene,
but I immediately picked up
on it, and I saw
this was clearly
going to be the future
or our doom, or both.
And I think we can
agree it's both.
So.
Oops, oops.
Now I just-- speaking of doom.
But so yes.
SPEAKER: All right.
So where is PLATO now?
Is it still operable?
BRIAN DEAR: Well, it's like
any of these vintage kinds
of things.
It's still running as
an emulated environment
on some Intel box somewhere.
There is a website you
can all go to, cyber1.org.
That's C-Y-B-E-R, then
the number one, dot org.
And a bunch of former
PLATO engineers
have kept all the
software around.
They got permission from
the University of Illinois
to take the entire catalog
of many thousands of hours
of educational
lessons and stuff,
and the games, all
the famous games.
Which we probably ought
to spend a moment about.
Because the games
themselves are remarkable.
So many of them
are the precursors
to things that would come later
that would be hugely famous.
And you name it,
the type of game,
the certain design
aspects of games,
the first graphical DND
games were clearly on PLATO.
There was a game called "DND"
that was out in like '75.
"Moria" came out
and around '75, '76,
which I played all the time.
It's still an incredible game.
It's on cyber1.
"Avatar" came out, and
I have a whole chapter
about all the dungeon games.
It's called Into the Dungeon.
Which is-- "Avatar" was
remarkable, because it
was incredibly sophisticated.
And what you started seeing--
and this is also
kind of interesting--
in the startup world today,
where the app culture, as it
were, everybody has an idea.
You go quickly develop
an app for a smartphone,
and you maybe get some VC money
and have your roll at the dice.
Maybe you'll get lucky
and get rich or whatever.
So many apps today are
built as reactions to--
I would argue-- similar
apps that predate it.
And you have an
idea for a smarter,
faster, better,
whatever your thing
is that's ER, that's
going to improve
upon what was built before.
And I would argue Google is a
reaction to Infoseek, Lycos,
and all the inadequate search
engines of the '90s, right?
Page Rank was the
big breakthrough.
And Facebook is clearly a
reaction to Myspace, which
was a reaction to
Friendster, and you just
keep going back to, I guess,
sixdegrees.com or something,
if anybody remembers that thing.
But that's often the way it was.
And the same thing was
happening, that pattern
was happening on PLATO.
Some kid would develop a
game, the next weekend,
some other kid would have
said, oh, I have a better idea.
We'll change this and that, and
they'd come out with a game.
And so it was kind of like a
Billboard Top 40 of hit apps,
as it were, every week,
or even every day.
There would be
something new that
was building upon and improving
upon some previous game
or whatever.
And by the mid to late '70s,
some of these high school kids
were spending four
years coding the game
before they were to release it.
"Avatar" didn't release
until about '79.
They started working
on it in like '75, '76,
when they were 13 years old.
And they wrote this
entire operating system.
In fact, they
literally had operators
who were to manage
the data and all kinds
of things that were going
on behind the scenes
to manage the game, because
it was so complicated.
And that had been built
upon all the designs
and thinkings of all the
games that came before it.
And it was just remarkable.
And then it would
be years later we
would start seeing the same
pattern emerge with the web
and with mobile apps today.
So
SPEAKER: And so I
think we're going
to open it up for questions
from the audience.
If anybody has a question,
please go to the mic
and ask away.
Otherwise, I have some more.
So go ahead.
Yeah.
Please.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
so much for the talk,
and thanks so much
for your time.
My question is if you--
so what you're suggesting
is things like AOL
Instant Messenger, right?
Which made messaging ubiquitous,
was basically available
30 years before that.
That, to me, suggests like
a conspiracy somewhere
that basically
suppressed the ideas that
came out of PLATO so that
it [INAUDIBLE] as mainstream
ideas.
So is that true, or is it--
BRIAN DEAR: Well, a
couple of comments.
One, if you've ever
heard of the phrase,
patent troll, what's
interesting about PLATO
is that it is the mother
lode of prior art.
In fact, I've a couple of times
been retained by attorneys
for gigantic companies,
including Google,
that were sued by trolls.
I just realized,
yeah, Google was
one of the defendants in
this giant, ridiculous case
of some crazy patent that no
one had ever built the thing,
and they'd been selling
it, selling it, selling it,
and then somebody owned
it, and they tried
to troll all the big companies.
And oftentimes the
attorneys would go
like, this is a job for PLATO.
Because they knew that
somebody did it back--
some kid did this very
thing in like 1973.
And sure enough,
in that one case
I remember I was involved in,
we were literally two days away.
We were making all
the arrangements
to truck a vintage terminal,
probably one of the ones
that the Living Computer
Museum here in town, down
to East Marshall,
Texas, or wherever
that infamous courthouse is that
does all the patent troll cases
in the United States.
Hi, Marshall.
But apparently, when
they heard that I
was going to give testimony
and a demo of PLATO,
and that I had been this author
of this book that was coming
out, that caused a settlement--
[SNAPS] like that.
So it was unfortunate.
Because I was really
looking forward to demoing
PLATO to a jury in Texas.
It would've been cool.
But yeah.
So that happened a lot.
So there's a lot of
cases where there
are predecessors on
PLATO for things that
would become commercial later.
And there are many
cases of that.
One of the things that it's
important to understand,
when Plato was--
the community was
doing all this stuff
in the early, mid, late '70s,
that was a time before there
were software patents.
There was no method
patent or anything
like that for software.
You could patent hardware
and physical things,
but they hadn't yet--
I can't remember what year the
software patents kicked in.
So that mindset
didn't really exist.
And there was also--
since this was all on
a university campus,
it was all an educational,
not-for-profit kind of thing.
So the motivation
for all these kids
that developed all
these cool things
was fame and glory online.
I mean, that was what they lived
for, and they got it in droves.
Some of these people were
literally net dot celebrities
before that term existed.
And just to give you
a sense of how strange
it was that PLATO, in a
way, I sometimes liken it
to the Galapagos.
It was a protected ecosystem
that developed on its own.
Much of the rest of the
world completely paid it
zero attention.
And so it didn't have any
predators, as it were.
And it was also, I guess you'd
say from a network perspective,
a homogeneous network.
They were just PLATO terminals
connected over the network.
So they didn't have to worry
about interoperability.
One quick anecdote that
again, will shed light
on how obscure PLATO
became, for years
I was poking around, looking
through the RFC documents,
if you're familiar with them.
The Request For Comments.
There's thousands of them
that formed the basis for all
the spec'ing that was done
to build the internet.
And RFC 600 was always missing
from every single repository.
And literally, as
of the early 2000s,
there were probably 50 RFC
repositories online by then,
and every single one
was missing number 600.
And by then, there were
several thousand RFCs,
and I could never find RFC 600.
And the reason I
was looking for it
is because it had
to do with PLATO.
And so someone
finally said, oh, you
need to talk to this
guy who wrote it.
He's in Santa Barbara somewhere.
He's probably retired.
So I tracked him down, and he
had a nice, big, long chuckle.
And he told me, yeah.
The RFC 600 was a
proposal to connect
what they called
an "Illinois plasma
terminal" to the ARPANET.
And so I asked the guy, why
would you want to do that?
And he said, to play the games!
Which I just, that was
a perfect response.
You know, it was
like, they were bored
doing the stuff on the ARPANET
that they could get access to,
and they were probably
telnetting and doing
all the rest, but
they heard word
that all the cool
stuff was on PLATO.
And unfortunately, the packet
network architecture of ARPANET
and the internet, later,
was anathema to Plato's
communications protocol,
which was designed, again,
every bit is sacred.
The notion of a packet
would be so wasteful.
All that overhead.
All those bits that
could be used for data,
and they're just
used for addressing?
It's like, are you nuts?
So again, everything was
designed for speed on PLATO
through 1,200 bit per second
serial or modem connections.
And so it was a very
different thing.
So I think they got
it somewhat working,
but with packets
and everything, it
would be like one character,
next character, next character,
plotting of text.
It was unusable.
So.
AUDIENCE: Do you
have any theories
on why some forward-thinking
things, like PLATO,
never had much of an effect
on industry, while others,
like, as you mentioned, Xerox
PARC have a lot of influence?
BRIAN DEAR: Well, that's
an interesting question.
Because in fact, a lot
of the thinking on PLATO
did influence industry and is
still influencing industry.
There are PLATO folks
that worked at University
of Illinois as
student programmers
and stuff that are
still working at Google.
I know one guy is one of the--
I don't know if he's a director
level, or-- a high level
manager.
Working on the data centers
and stuff like that.
And the build out of all that.
So they're out there.
I mean, I just saw
a guy yesterday down
in Silicon Valley who worked
at Apple for like 20 years.
And a whole bunch of people
came out from Illinois
and went to Apple.
First they did Atari,
then they moved to Apple,
and they did their
20 years at Apple,
which when you think about
it, must have been remarkable.
Steve, then no Steve,
then Steve back.
You know, that kind of history.
Right?
And but yeah.
Probably the most famous
case of a technology
that inspired
something that became
a multibillion dollar hit
in the PC and internet world
is Lotus Notes.
Lotus Notes is named
after PLATO Notes.
Plato Notes was written
by a 17-year-old kid
named Dave Woolley in 1973.
He was literally one
of those kids that
wandered in from
across the street,
from his local high school.
And they wouldn't go away.
They wouldn't be turned away.
And he just was so
curious about the system,
he learned how to program.
And they said, well, we really
need some kind of conferencing
or message board system.
People need to be communicating
24/7 asynchronously.
Like, I don't know how
to solve this problem,
and it's 2:00 in the
morning right now.
Maybe someone can
answer this tomorrow.
Let me post a note somewhere.
And so he went off
and wrote Plato Notes
and shipped it in
August of 1973.
And it completely transformed
everything on PLATO.
It started the whole
era of collaboration
online with teams
and everything.
And then, of course,
they realized, well,
we don't have to just
talk about work subjects.
We could also talk about
sports and music and movies
and politics and all the rest.
So sure enough, all
that stuff started too.
And all hell broke loose
when that all started.
And years later--
well, actually,
in the '80s, a
couple of friends who
had worked all as student
programmers at the U of I,
they went off to
various companies,
and they decided to
form a startup company
in 1984 called Iris Associates.
And that's where
Lotus Notes came from.
That's Ray Ozzie, Tim
Halvorson, and Len Kawell.
Len lives right here
in town somewhere.
He has a little startup, I think
right in Kirkland, actually.
But so they went
off and did that.
And they had funding
and support from Lotus,
which was famous for 1,
2, 3, but not forever.
Because Microsoft
came out with Excel.
Lotus needed something new.
They went with Notes.
They shipped it as
a $64,000 product
in I think it was 1988 or '89.
It was a massive
hit in enterprises.
It wound up having
about 110 million users.
It was sold-- basically,
it was the last big product
that Lotus had, and then Lotus
was sold to IBM for about $3
and 1/2 billion in about '95,
'96 because of Lotus Notes.
And if you look at the
feature set of Lotus Notes,
a lot of people
would cringe today,
because we have Open Web and
stuff, Google Docs and stuff
like that.
But they didn't
have that back then.
This was a stepping stone.
Once again, a reaction
to what had gone before.
They saw this great
collaboration capability
on Plato, but now,
could we bring all that
to a local area network
environment in an enterprise?
And that's exactly
what Lotus Notes was.
It had very many of
the same features
as had been on PLATO that had
been written by the kids back--
So a lot of technology
made its way out.
A lot of games did too.
There were a bunch
of PLATO game authors
that made the leap to
Apple II and IBM PC.
And some of them became
multimillionaires.
And in fact, I have
a whole chapter
on one guy with an
incredible life story.
I urge you to read it.
This guy wrote one of
the-- probably the most
beautiful game on
PLATO, called "Mahjong."
And it was the tile--
the Chinese tile game.
Gorgeous graphics.
And I interviewed him in 1997.
And I had seen him online in
the '80s when I was on PLATO.
And I remembered he was
very active and everything.
And halfway during
the interview,
I asked him a
question or whatever,
and he mentioned, oh, by the
way, I'm in a wheelchair,
and I'm a quadriplegic.
And I programmed "Mahjong"
with a mouth stick.
That's literally the
only input he had.
And he had designed--
I have a full--
really, probably the best
photo color photo in the book
is the screenshot of "Mahjong."
It is staggering that he
did that with a mouth stick.
He wrote all the code.
Then he bought a
Macintosh in 1985,
and he ported all of
the game to, I guess,
C language environment
on the Mac.
All the graphics and
everything, again,
just using input devices
for disabled people.
And an absolute miracle.
Activision licensed
it, published it,
and they sold 10 million copies.
And he now lives in Hawaii.
And I went out and visited
him a couple of years ago,
and it was just
absolutely remarkable.
He's doing great.
And he's had-- he's made
a whole life for himself.
And he tells me it was
all because of PLATO.
PLATO saved his life.
He had-- he had a wrestling--
sorry, a gymnastics accident
at Stanford when he
was an undergrad.
He was on the varsity
gym team, and he
was in the gymnastics
gymnasium and was
in the middle of doing a flip
or something in practice one
day and landed in what was
called the crash pit, which
is foam stuff.
There just wasn't enough
foam, and he broke his neck.
And he should have
died right on the spot.
And there was a whole cascade
of coincidences and miracles
that happened that day
and in subsequent days,
and I'll urge you to read
the chapter to find out more.
So how's that for a teaser?
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Thank you again
for being here today.
The topic is of
particular interest to me,
because I started college
a year after you did.
And the second
programming job I ever had
was writing courseware
on a PLATO system.
BRIAN DEAR: Cool, cool.
I was wondering if anybody here
had been there and done that.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
I didn't do it for a long time.
But I was wondering if you
could elaborate a bit more.
Somebody asked about
what happened to it,
and you talked past how it still
lives on an emulator on X 86
now.
But what-- from the--
I was working on it like '81,
'82, something like that.
Could you elaborate what
happened through the '80s?
Did it just kind of
die a slow death, or--
BRIAN DEAR: It was
kind of similar to what
happened to Digital
Equipment Corporation.
If you remember,
they made faxes.
They were kind of important,
and a lot of people used them.
Now DEC is this
ancient history thing.
Control Data Corporation was
a major player in the computer
industry, and they were based in
Minneapolis, Bloomington area.
And their whole history
was they sold mainframes.
They sold big iron.
And that was their
whole mindset.
That was the whole sales force
was oriented to selling--
getting a customer to write
a check for like $5 million,
$10 million per box.
They used to have a saying.
If you can plug it into
the wall, it's too small.
You needed, literally,
a dedicated channel
from the electric company to
power one of their things.
And so PLATO, for a
while, fit in that model.
They could sell big
mainframe systems
with gazillions of terminals
to go with it to universities.
And they did that
all over the world.
There were PLATO systems
set up at University
of Alberta, University
of Quebec, probably--
maybe a dozen or more
in the United States
at various universities, like
Delaware, all over the place.
And so they really tried really
hard to commercialize it.
But their timing-- once again,
timing is either good or bad.
And in the era where the
microcomputer is just raging,
and it's like a freight--
it's not only a freight train,
it's a freight train
carrying freight trains
of the future at you.
Right?
That was what they
faced every single day.
So they might try to
sell to a university
or to a gigantic
school district,
and they'd say, why should
we spend $10 million
on this system and then
another maybe $10 million
on telecommunication costs,
thanks to Ma Bell at the time.
People didn't realize that the
phone lines often were more
expensive than the hardware.
And I've already described
how crazy expensive
the hardware was.
Phone lines were
even worse than that.
Thousands per month
and that kind of thing.
Why should we buy all that stuff
when there's like this Apple II
that Apple's
practically giving away?
We could buy a whole
roomful of them
and still afford chalk for
the classroom or whatever.
So it became a real problem.
And so the company, Control
Data, really struggled.
Meanwhile, the University
of Illinois, that
was the home of PLATO.
That's where the lab was.
They were entrepreneurial too.
And they decided, we're going
to have to part ways with CDC,
and we're going to try to
commercialize it ourselves.
We tried with CDC, it doesn't
look like it's going to go,
and we still think
we can do this.
And so Don Bitzer, who was
the founder and the leader
of the PLATO project,
had a vision, still,
in the early '80s that he could
get hundreds of thousands,
maybe millions of
terminals connected
all over the world on a network
of servers, essentially.
What he was kind
of envisioning was
very similar to what Google has
or any major net company now
with data centers
all over the place.
You know, fail-safe, redundant
hardware, any server goes down,
the user never even notices.
It just flips to another server,
where all the data is still
there, and it's
all instantaneous,
and everybody's happy.
So they were thinking
about those kinds of things
even in the '80s.
And so Illinois spun
off another project
called NovaNET, which
was a commercial venture
to commercialize PLATO.
And that actually did well.
That actually did
commercially well.
And it survived until just
a couple of years ago.
In fact, the
epilogue of the book
is the final night when
NovaNET shuts down.
And I reluctantly stayed
up late that night,
waiting for this
thing to shut down.
And of course,
whoever was supposed
to shut it down at like 2:00
in the morning was late.
So there were like 22 people,
these die-hard PLATO folks,
hanging around, chatting in
the Notes files, and in turn,
talking stuff for
a couple hours,
waiting just for the thing
to shut down and issue the--
you know, NovaNET
will be shutting down
in 60 seconds, dot, dot, dot.
NovaNET will be shutting down
in 30 seconds, dot, dot, dot.
10 seconds, then
NovaNET is gone.
And that was it.
It's-- they've-- by the early
2000s, I believe it was,
NovaNET had been acquired by
a whole chain of companies,
like one fish
eating another fish,
bigger fish ate that fish, and
it was now owned by Pearson,
the gigantic, global
conglomerate that ironically
had gobbled up a bunch of
PLATO's competitors from
the '80s and '90s as well.
But they had decided it
was time to go web and use
different technology in
a different product line.
So NovaNET was finally,
quietly shut down.
But what's important, to
get back to your question,
is that NovaNET found a market.
And it wasn't one
that was sexy or cool,
and it wasn't going to be
written about in "Wired."
It was basically remedial
education and the last chance
for high school
kids, for example,
who were struggling and
were going to be kicked out
of school permanently
because they just
didn't have the
learning skills, or they
had learning difficulties.
One thing that was
discovered early on PLATO
was that students who have
those kind of difficulties
do really well interacting
with a computer
because none of the social peer
pressures of performing well
in front of all of these other
kids in their class, none
of that existed.
You could have a one-on-one
interaction with the computer
teacher, and if
you made a mistake,
and the screen
said no, try again,
you wouldn't get laughed
at in the classroom.
And they also discovered that
PLATO had a gigantic market
in prison education.
So in prisons all over the
United States in the '70s
and '80s, PLATO was used to
provide GED training and things
like that, job training,
so that some inmate could
get out and get a job and have
skills and even get a degree.
And it turned out to be
incredibly successful.
And that was one of the markets
that really worked, which was,
who knew?
SPEAKER: All right.
So we're close to
the end of the hour.
A couple of things.
There are, I think, only
two of us in the room,
and I'm not one of them, who
have actually seen and used
a PLATO system, but that
can be different Saturday.
Because at 1 o'clock at
the Living Computer Museum,
Brian is going to
go, and he's going
to give a talk about
his book, and then
they're going to have a
two-hour session after.
There are actually two
running systems there.
So I encourage anybody who's
interested to go and take
a look.
And that's this Saturday.
And also we have a few
more books for sale.
With the Google subsidy,
they're half-price.
So they're only $20.
And yeah, Brian
will stick around,
I think, to sign
them afterwards.
And other than that, let's
thank Brian for coming.
BRIAN DEAR: Thank you.
