[SIGCIS-Members] PLATO History

Irish, Sharon Lee slirish at illinois.edu
Thu Feb 21 13:23:42 PST 2013


Hello, and thanks Tom!
To add a bit to the PLATO discussion, this 2010 conference held at the University of Illinois is  archived and includes Don Bitzer and others talking about PLATO:
http://50years.lis.illinois.edu/

Sharon

Sharon Irish
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel St. MC-493
Champaign, IL 61820
slirish at illinois.edu
(mobile) 217.766-2411
www.sharonirish.org

From: Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org<mailto:thaigh at computer.org>>
Reply-To: "thaigh at computer.org<mailto:thaigh at computer.org>" <thaigh at computer.org<mailto:thaigh at computer.org>>
Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013 2:18 PM
To: "members at sigcis.org<mailto:members at sigcis.org>" <members at sigcis.org<mailto:members at sigcis.org>>
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] PLATO History

Hello everyone,

I recently came across mention of an interesting project on the history of the Plato system.


The historical importance of Plato is, I think, reasonably well understood among expert historians of computing as a crucial contribution to the development of large-scale timesharing, computer mediated communication, online communities, and educational computing. We're also aware of the direct line of influence on Lotus Notes from Plato. It does have a full chapter in Chris McDonald's 2011 Princeton Ph.D. Thesis, and pops up in work on the history of CDC and William Norris, but has not received a thorough history or been featured in many overview histories of computer technology.

So I'm glad to learn that Brian Dear has taken up the challenge of preserving and disseminating information on Plato. His main site is http://platohistory.org/. There was a big event at the Computer History Museum back in 2010, http://platohistory.org/conference/50th-anniversary/ and videos of the panel sessions are available online if you scroll way down on his main page. So the project hadn’t exactly been in stealth mode, but I thought that if I hadn’t known about it then you might not either.

Dear has apparently conducted lots of interviews and gathered masses of material for a book in progress, http://friendlyorangeglow.com/. I’m looking forward to the book, but also hope that he will be making sure that this material is properly archived so that future researchers will be able to tell their own stories about Plato.

Tom
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