During my summer vacation I read John Markoff’s book “What the Dormouse Said.” 1 I assume it was the publisher that insisted on adding the subtitle “How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry”; it does give you an idea what the book is about, but actually it’s somewhat misleading.
Markoff describes the prehistory of personal computing—in particular the work of Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay—from a different angle: his focus is on the social environment in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and early 1970s and the personal relationships and connections. If these names tell you something, the book is a gripping read and gives fascinating insights into the social background of their more widely known technical visions and achievements.
However, Markoff doesn’t really write about the personal computer industry, as his account ends with the founding of the Homebrew Computer Club (the rest is history, as they say), and while some companies—Apple and Atari, for example—certainly had roots in the counterculture, I find it debatable whether the industry was “shaped” by the counterculture. I would argue that Microsoft wasn’t. More importantly, one of the interesting aspects in the history of personal computers is the marked discontinuity between the research done by Engelbart at SRI and Kay at Xerox PARC on one side and the development of personal computers on the other side. Markoff is clearly aware of this and explicitly points it out. In short, only very few developments from NLS were transferred to the Alto, and very few developments from the Alto transferred to PCs. In fact, one could argue that the most significant aspects from NLS (it’s not the mouse) and the Alto (it’s not the GUI) are still not available on modern PCs.
I don’t want to go into more details here but rather want to point out another fascinating discontinuity, which is not explicitly mentioned by Markoff. Markoff mentions that in the summer of 1968, Alan Kay (then a graduate student at the University of Utah) did a campus tour at the University of Illinois:
“There on a laboratory bench, he discovered a one-inch lump of glass and neon gas that was capable of lighting up different tiny spots on command. It was a flat-panel display, and it left Kay absolutely dumbfounded. It was instantly obvious that not only would it be possible to make a computer personal, but that the computer could be portable as well. Kay spent the next several hours with the other graduate students calculating whether or not it would be possible to place a 512-by-512-pixel flat-panel display directly on the Flex computer. They decided that, according to Moore’s Law, it wouldn’t be possible until the late seventies or early eighties—an impossibly long time into the future.” (p. 146)
The plasma display Kay saw at the University of Illinois was developed at the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory (CERL), which most notably developed the PLATO system, a forerunner of today’s e-learning platforms—but again, not in a direct line. Even though the work on PLATO was groundbreaking, it is now largely forgotten. I give a very brief outline of PLATO in Section 2.2.2 of my dissertation. The CERL researchers were not concerned with personal computers per se, but nevertheless introduced concepts such as online forums and message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player online games. The 8080-based PLATO V terminals featured plasma displays with infrared touch panels and local processing capabilities, so that they were able to execute programs downloaded from the host computer—this is actually very similar to how today’s Web browsers execute JavaScript code downloaded from Web servers. For audio output, a synthesizer could be connected to the terminal, which was an innovation in itself.
However, there’s no direct line from PLATO to modern systems, and even though Kay was apparently impressed by the plasma display developed at CERL, I’m not aware of direct influences from PLATO on Kay’s later work at PARC. [Kay was interested in teaching and learning, but if he took note of PLATO, I’d assume that he would have rejected it due to its roots in programmed instruction; but this would be interesting to check.]
What about the graduate students’ projection? The patent for the plasma display was filed in December 1966; the report on the PLATO V terminal, which used the plasma display, was released in April 1978. The estimation was thus spot on.
Footnotes:
John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said. How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. New York: Penguin, 2005.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Michael Piotrowski (March 12, 2016). Plato and the Dormouse. NLP for Historical Texts. Retrieved December 3, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/schu
