PLATO Archives : Innowiki

Social Network

When they’re not rigging elections, sowing discord, or amplifying hate social networks are a fun, simple, and convenient way to stay in touch. However, they suffer serious privacy issues under current implementations.

Electronic social networks, in various forms, are older than Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The first online bulletin-board enabling people to chat and hang out virtually was created by David Wooley and Doug Brown in 1973 on the PLATO system. Subsequently, Usenet, a similar bulletin-board system that ran primarily on email via the internet, dates to 1979. Afterwards, online communities sprang up on private bulletin-board system in future years. America Online, CompuServe, and The Well all had some form of social networking.

The most notable modern implementation is Friendster, founded in 2002. At one point it had 115 million active users and sold for $39.5 million. However, it eventually botched a strategic pivot to a gaming site and died in June 2015. Eventually, MySpace blasted on the web in 2003, eclipsing Friendster. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp purchased it for $508 million in July 2005. However, thanks to infamous internal political fihghts, they ran it into the ground and sold it for $35 million in June 2011.

As of 2019, there are a countless number of social networks. Unquestionably, the current reigning champ of social networking is Facebook. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in 2004, Facebook boasts over two billion active users and is on-track to recognize about $69 billion in 2019 revenue. Facebook also owns social media darling Instagram, which is especially popular with young people, and communication tool WhatsApp that they paid $21.8 billion for, or $55 per user.

Instant Messaging

Sending instant messages by computer is fun and convenient. Moreover, text chatting is asynchronous, unlike voice or video. Accordingly, people need not communicate in real-time. Surprisingly, text messaging became extremely popular.

The earliest instant messaging system designed for that purpose was “Talkomatic” and “term-talk” for the PLATO system. College students David Wooley and Doug Brown created Talkomatic and term-talk, effectively inventing text messaging.

Significantly, Talkomatic took advantage of shared memory and allowed five users to simultaneously talk to one another. As each person typed, the text appeared on the screen of the others. Subsequently, term-talk worked similarly, albeit for two users at a time. One user invoked the program and entered the name of a different user, who was then notified. Thereupon, if the second user chose to accept the invitation, they would then type to one another in real-time.

Real-time text chatting spread to proprietary bulletin-board systems as they developed. Eventually, a standard evolved Instant Relay Chat, or IRC.

Subsequently, Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging came along in 1992. SMS enabled users to type messages to one another via phones. Four years later came the first peer-to-peer instant messaging client, ICQ. Since then, there are countless real-time texting applications.

Touchscreen

Touch screens existed in science fiction long before they entered the real-world. Star-Trek: The Next Generation made extensive use of what today are modern touch screens decades before they became common.

Johnson described the touch screen in a seminal paper. Johnson himself never actually created nor patented a touch-screen. Sam Hurst at the U. of KY developed a touch screen sensor in 1971 though it was not see-through until 1974.

The first real touch-screen, with a screen visible behind the touch, was used on Bitzer’s PLATO system, deployed in 1972. PLATO used infrared beams and detected when they were broken rather than more modern systems that detect a screen touch.

In 1983, HP released the HP-150, the first touchscreen computer. BellSouth released the first touchscreen phone, the Simon Personal Communicator, in 1993. By the mid 2000s touchscreens were becoming more mainstream. Finally, with the introduction of Apple’s iPhone in 2007, touchscreens started on the path towards commonplace tech.

Hurst, the early touchscreen pioneer, went on to found a successful touchscreen company, Elographics (now Elo Touch).

Plasma Panel

1964

Donald Bitzer
Gene Slottow
Robert Wilson

Plasma panels form fonts, images, and other patterns using plasma, rather than tubes. The panels are flat, cool, and use less power than CRT tubes.

Bitzer developed the plasma panel as the monitor for his teaching computer, PLATO.

PLATO is a lesser-known fountain of innovation. Along with Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, GE, and Kodak, PLATO created an enormous number of modern technologies. Networked computers, text messaging, online community, and touch-screens all came from PLATO besides plasma panels.

The system was originally developed for Computer Based Training (CBT) by Donald Bitzer and others at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. PLATO was used for training, much like the web also has an enormous amount of training material. But, much like the web, the system did much more than train people. PLATO is arguably the forerunner of the World Wide Web.

Unlike CRT screens, the panels are flat which helped enable PLATO’s infrared touch-screen technology. PLATO plasma panels were orange with 512×512 single-color pixels, 262,144 total. In contrast, an iPhone XR has 1792×828 red, green, and blue pixels, 4,451,328 total.

The panels worked by creating a matrix of wires. When electrical impulses from the X and Y sides of the panel had an intersecting pulse, the plasma glowed orange. Using these early pixels created fonts and even primitive graphics.

Image result for plato display — PLATO panel displaying EMPIRE game

Control Data Corporation, IBM, and TDK Electronics all licensed plasma panel technology.

CRT technology cost less and responded faster than plasma panels. It was decades before plasma panels became less expensive and morphed into a popular consumer electronic in the form of television. Starting in 2005, plasma panels replaced projection televisions and CRT’s as large televisions. Hanging on walls everywhere, the panels dropped quickly in price. They grew in popularity because the background was pure black, unlike other flat panels. However, they tended to “burn-in” — leaving images behind — and eventually dropped in popularity.

Eventually, LCD, LED, and finally OLED technology replaced plasma panels.