There has been commentary in the last few days about the new article in Wired discussing Microsoft's Ray Ozzie. Reading through it I noticed the references to PLATO.
"Ozzie had discovered Plato, an acronym for programmed logic for automated teaching operations. Though largely forgotten now, it was a system almost absurdly ahead of its time, one of those hidden pockets of innovation that bred a cult of followers who even now will bend your ear with tales of their glory days. Only this time, the tales are true. Concocted by a university engineering professor with the weirdly appropriate name of Don Bitzer, the system comprised several hundred terminals, both on and off campus, connected to a CDC 6400 computer. The goal was "automated learning." But what made Plato irresistible to Ozzie was its interactive nature. Users had direct contact and direct feedback—not just to computers but to one another"
It seems that Ozzie was quite influenced by PLATO and Ozzie had an obvious influence on Lotus Notes and Live Mesh. Even the IBM history of Lotus Notes mentions PLATO in its opening paragraph. The PLATO reference is lost on virtually everyone, and I haven't even thought about it for decades, but its mention jogged my memory that it was pretty much the first computer that I ever used - before the Apple IIe, Commodore 64 and ZX spectrum. At that stage I didn't really have much appreciation with what I was playing with and obviously it didn't inspire me enough to rush of and build Lotus Notes - but that was probably because I was trying to get through school at the time .
When I was growing up my mum worked for IBM, bringing punch cards home for me to colour in with crayons. Later she worked for Control Data, which distributed PLATO, and I used to have to sometimes go to her office and kill time. In her office was a PLATO network which, at the age of about ten, I used to poke and prod around on. And when I say poke and prod, I really mean it - PLATO's UI was a 512x512 bitmap on a plasma display with a 15x15 touch sensitive grid. PLATO had a touch sensitive graphic display before the mouse and IBM PC even existed. Interesting too was that the UI was far ahead of its time and accessible to all in a period when computer usage was limited to the technical elite. I found a copy of the PLATO user guide online which appears surprisingly simple, considering that at the time Unix's vi was considered the pinnacle of UI innovation (although to some it still is). A key paradigm of the PLATO UI was a 'Next' button on the keyboard, which was a winner for the storyboard style navigation. Can you imagine how many support calls asking 'Where is the any key?' could have been saved over the last twenty years!
I suppose that from the point of using innovative technology at the time I was quite privileged. I remember years later playing around at my mum's office in around 1985 with an Apple Lisa, the Mac predecessor that sat in the corner unutilised. It was the first system that I had seen that used a mouse and booted up into a GUI OS in a few seconds. I remember at the time thinking that the animated wastebasket was pretty cool - little did I know how much it was going to become part of everyday computing.
I also spent a lot of time in the preceding years developing at school in SuperPilot, a environment for computer assisted training on the Apple IIe. In all of 64K of memory you had the OS, Dev environment and runtime environment. It was also one of those ahead-of-its-time products and could do graphics, music and had a user input reading mechanism that allowed the programmer to specify the allowed accuracy of the input - similar to what we are still struggling to get to with regular expressions and client-side scripting.
It is hardly surprising that Ozzie picked up on PLATO as an inspiration for Lotus Notes, at the time SMTP did not even exist and sending of email required a user to telnet into port 25 and issue instructions:
HELO test.com
250 OK
MAIL FROM:Admin@test.com
250 OK - MAIL FROM Admin@test.com
RCPT TO: User@Domain.Com
250 OK - Recipient User@ Domain.Com
354 Send data. End with CRLF.CRLF
Subject: test message
.
250 OK
Hardly surprising that if a transcript like the one above was considered the state of the art that a GUI based system with simple prompts and a Next button seemed revolutionary.
The Wired magazine article may just be an attempt to try and find something interesting about Ray Ozzie other than being the guy who invented Lotus Notes - but the PLATO reference made me dredge up some really old computing memories. While Microsoft's new architect may not have as many interesting anecdotes as Bill Gates he does at least seem to lean on historical innovation.
If Live Mesh and other products developed under Ozzie's stewardship can be half as revolutionary as PLATO was compared to the Unix and VAX of the day then we are in for some very cool products indeed.
Simon Munro