Category: media

PLATO: The Seed Of The Social Computing Fabric

Published January 25, 2010 by cgerrish

Plato, the philosopher, captured the sense of the Socratic Dialogue as a process of exploration and teaching. Dialogue becomes the medium through which philosophical thinking is distributed. The computer system called PLATO created a social computing fabric through which educational experiences were allowed to unfold.

The preliminary discussions about what would eventually become the PLATO system began in the shadow of the cold war and the 1957 launch of sputnik. The first PLATO system was launched in 1960 and operated on the Illiac 1 computer at the University of Illinois. Eventually the PLATO system would evolve through four architectures. The system that enabled what we would recognize as social computing was launched as the 60s rambled to a close:

In 1972 a new system named PLATO IV was ready for operation. The PLATO IV terminal was a major innovation. It included Bitzer’s orange plasma display invention which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The display was a 512×512 bitmap, with both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. Users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary bitmap graphics. Compressed air powered a piston-driven microfiche image selector that permitted colored images to be projected on the back of the screen under program control. The PLATO IV display also included a 16-by-16 grid infrared touch panel allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen.

It was also possible to connect the terminal to peripheral devices. One such peripheral was the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind (named after inventor Sherwin Gooch), a synthesizer that offered 4 voice music synthesis to provide sound in PLATO courseware. This was later supplanted on the PLATO V terminal by the Gooch Cybernetic Synthesizer, which had 16 voices that could be programmed individually or combined to make more complex sounds. This allowed for what today is known as multimedia experiences.

Recently PLATO was thrust into my attention again through Jon Udell’s conversation with Brian Dear about the upcoming 50th Anniversary of the system via ITconversations:

Jon Udell / Brian Dear on PLATO
Plato Turns 50

Brian Dear is working on a book on PLATO and is involved in PLATO HISTORY, remembering the future, the celebration of this innovative system at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Dear began using the system in 1979. In an excerpt from a conversation on the WELL, Dear describes how PLATO planted the seed of social computing:

PLATO was the first computer system, network really, that scaled with lots of people. It was bigger than ARPANET at least for a while, with many capabilities at a level of usage that we wouldn’t see until the 1990s. A PLATO user didn’t use a computer, they “belonged” to the system. It was a community. For me, I was drawn immediately to this sense that a computer wasn’t for number-crunching or lonely things like word processing, spreadsheets, or video games, the way Apples, Commodores, etc were being used, but it was a “place” where you could meet, interact, stay in touch, get answers to questions, and share and make discoveries.

While PLATO is not well known, even among the current set of social technologists, there are some interesting threads and connections to the current story of our networked real-time computing environment. When we think of the roots of modern computing, we look to Xerox Parc and Doug Englebart’s Augmentation Research Center, but as personal computing expands into social computing, PLATO deserves a place in that pantheon. From the undependable Wikipedia entry we see the connections forming:

Early in 1972, researchers from Xerox PARC were given a tour of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. At this time they were shown parts of the system such as the Show Display application generator for pictures on PLATO (later translated into a graphics-draw program on the Xerox Star workstation), and the Charset Editor for “painting” new characters (later translated into a “Doodle” program at PARC), and the Term Talk and Monitor Mode communications program. Many of the new technologies they saw were adopted and improved upon when these researchers returned to Palo Alto, California. They subsequently transferred improved versions of this technology to Apple Inc..

The direct link from Plato to the present future of computing runs through a young man from Chicago who began attending the University of Illinois in 1973. Abandoning the punch cards that were the staple of computer science at the time, he was drawn like a moth to the glowing orange gas-plasma screens in CERL (the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory).

Ray Ozzie, now Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, threw himself into the world of Plato. In fact, Plato Notes, was a strong influence on Lotus Notes. Ozzie has understood software from the beginning as operating in a networked social computing environment. But more than that, it gave Ozzie insight into the potential for human contact through this new medium:

One incident in particular introduced Ozzie to the magic that comes when people connect via computer. He had taken a part-time assignment helping a professor finish writing some courseware. The prof lived on the other side of town, so Ozzie collaborated with him remotely. Ozzie came to know and like his boss, save for one annoyance. “He was the worst typist ever,” Ozzie says. “He was very eloquent on email, but on Term Talk it was just dit-dit-dit, sometimes an error, but agonizingly slow.” At the end of the project, the man threw a party at his house, and Ozzie discovered the reason for the typing problem: The professor was a quadriplegic and had been entering text by holding a stick in his teeth and poking it at the keyboard. Ozzie was floored. “I remember really questioning my own attitudes,” Ozzie says. “I had been communicating with him mind to mind.

During the day, the Plato system was dedicated to the task of educating students, but after 10pm the programmers and users were allowed to play on the system.

The Plato system is still alive and has been transplanted to the World Wide Web. You can find it at:

www.cyber1.org

For those of you in the Bay Area, the 50th Anniversary of Plato will be celebrated at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on June 2nd and 3rd, 2010. Dr. Donald Bitzer, the founder of Plato, and Ray Ozzie will be in attendance. I’ll definitely be there to help remember the future of computing.

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Twitter Lists, Track and Broadcasting

Published January 18, 2010 by cgerrish

I’ve been trying to understand what Twitter lists are good for. Both Twitter’s new retweet feature and the list feature are imports from FriendFeed. Even in its current state, FriendFeed continues to be the R&D department for social media.

The thing I find uninteresting about lists is the fact that they’re mostly static— they simply serve as a kind of personal taxonomy. These Twitter users belong in this category. This is where we begin to feel the loss of track + filters. The assembly of a network of connected micro-messages around a set of keywords and run through a filter does what lists do dynamically and in real time. With the release of Twitter’s streaming API, nicknamed birddog, it’s possible we’ll start to see track-like features return— at least for subsets of the firehose. Manually curated lists at the level of classification are just a replay of RSS readers.

There are those who will say that if you’re using Twitter in a one-to-many broadcast mode, you’re not doing it right. But I think it’s pretty well established that Twitter is ambiguous and flexible enough to accommodate many modes of use simultaneously. Twitter lists strike me as a particularly good tool for news organizations.

If the New York Times or CNN has a team of journalists, photographers, videographers and radio journalists covering a breaking story like the earthquake in Haiti, a Twitter list would be a compact way to deliver coverage. Hyperlinks within the tweets could send readers off to breaking news, in-depth backgrounders and ongoing live conversations. CNN’s list and the New York Times’s list would be differentiated by who was on each coverage team and the editorial approach of each news organization. The list would exist for the duration of the story.

Rather than serving as part of a taxonomy, or classification of Twitter users— the list would define individuals with a common purpose— covering the Haiti earthquake, or the Senate race in Massachusetts. Each news organization might have a set of active lists ongoing at any time. The more specific and real time the list, the more valuable it would be.

Of course, someone might create a list of all the news organizations covering a breaking story. But I think the effect of this would be to dilute the value of the stream rather than enhance it. You could also make the argument that the hashtag and the wisdom of the crowd would ultimately provide equal or better coverage. However, it’s not necessary to choose between one approach and the other. Each will ultimately include elements of the other.

The television medium is destabilizing and being absorbed into the real-time Network. While newspapers and television used to consider the Internet as a medium for the re-purposing and re-use of content, soon the reverse will be true. The real-time Network will be the primary publication vehicle with television and newspapers becoming containers for re-use.

And, of course, I use the word Twitter as a synecdoche. (A specific class name used to refer to a general set of associated things)

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With Just A Wave Of Her Hand…

Published January 17, 2010 by cgerrish

My thoughts have been swirling around the point of interaction for some time now. And by that I mean the point of human-computer interaction. To connect up the threads, at first, I’ve began looking backwards. Perhaps all the way to the Jacquard loom and the punch cards used to control the patterns, and then on to the punch cards used on the early mainframes.

I’m sure there were many steps in between, but my mind races ahead to the command line. This extremely powerful and elegant point of interaction has never really been superseded. It continues to be the favored mode of interaction for a number of software development activities. But it was the graphical user interface that provided a point of interaction that changed the medium.

Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo of the work undertaken by the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) gives us all the fundamental modes of interaction. The keyboard, the mouse/trackpad, the headset, hypertext and the graphic user interface. Within that set of interaction points, we’ve started to expand the repertoire. With the introduction of the iPhone, the trackpad gesture has gained increasing importance.

On a separate track we’ve seen video games controllers become ever more complex. The point of interaction for the game starts to reflect the kind of speed and complexity we create in our virtual gaming worlds.

It’s with the Wii and Project Natal that we start to see the surface of the trackpad detached from the computing device, extruded into three dimensions, and then dematerialized. The interaction gestures can now be captured in the space around us. Originally, the graphic user interface (mouse clicks, windows, desktop) was criticized for the limitations it imposed.

The other key development was the displacement of computing from the local device to the Network of connected devices. The interaction point is now to a new Networked medium. This is the converged form of what McLuhan understood as television. The development of new interaction modes traces a path toward opening to greater numbers of participants the new medium. Beyond mass media, there is the media of connected micro-communities.

Popular culture and music culture has always had a big impact on the development of cutting-edge technology. When we think of controlling technology through hand gestures, we can start with the ether-wave theremin created by Leon Theremin.

And then there was Jimi Hendrix playing Wild Thing at Monterrey Pop, gesturing wildly to pull sound out his stratocaster.

This is one of those in-between moments. The wave unleashed by xerox-parc and the augmentation research center is about to be followed by a new wave. The signs are all around us.

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Virtual Machines, Run-times and Turtles All The Way Down

Published January 10, 2010 by cgerrish

There’s this idea of standing with your own two feet on the ground. We know which way is up.

I’ve been thinking about the implications of the virtual machine. Our friends at Wikipedia give the following definition:

A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (i.e. a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine.

Of course, then they add that some virtual machines may have no correspondence to actual hardware. One of the more common uses of a virtual machine is to create a software version of a computer operating system. On my Macintosh computer, I run a program called Parallels that allows me to run Windows, and Windows programs, side-by-side with Macintosh programs. The Macintosh runs an application that runs an operating system that runs an application. The ‘two-feet on the ground’ aspect of this is that the Macintosh operating system talks to the hardware— it’s this that provides the ground on which virtual machines can be deployed. The speed of today’s hardware/software systems makes the latency between the machine and the virtual machine almost unnoticeable.

Once the operating system is virtualized it starts to resemble the run-time system. It’s an environment where application code can be run. As we look around, we find a number of things that might fit into this category. For instance, Android, which is called an operating system, is really a virtual operating system that sits on top of the Linux operating system.

When people talk about a Web Operating System, often I’m not sure what they’re referring to. But in the model of the virtual machine, the Web run-times enabled by the operating system include: webkit, gecko and trident. In the sphere of vector graphics animations, the run-times include: Flash and Silverlight. In Silverlight 4.x, an application can contain an HTML page, which is interpreted by the local default Web browser, and that HTML page can contain a Flash object. The in-and-outs of things start to get a little complicated.

Putting our feet firmly on the ground, we can see that it all starts with the hardware and the operating system. Nothing happens without these foundation pieces. This is the bedrock on which we stand. Although this perspective begins to sound a little like the story about turtles from Stephen Hawking‘s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which starts:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

While we may look at the computer hardware and operating system as the ground, we could also turn things on their head. What if, instead, we look at the environment where many virtual machines can operate as the new ground. Copernicus rather than Ptolemy. The hardware and its operating system are just and entry point into this Network of virtual machines. The one is a path to the many, and out of the many, there is one (E pluribus unum). Or as someone once said, the Network is the computer.

There’s this new idea of standing with your own two feet on the ground. We know which way is up.

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