Dear, Brian
WORK TITLE: The Friendly Orange Glow
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1961
WEBSITE: http://www.brianstorms.com/
CITY: Santa Fe
STATE: NM
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
http://friendlyorangeglow.com/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2017017223 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017017223 |
| HEADING: | Dear, Brian, 1961- |
| 000 | 00951cz a2200121n 450 |
| 001 | 10410496 |
| 005 | 20170327092216.0 |
| 008 | 170327n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2017017223 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Dear, Brian, |d 1961- |
| 670 | __ |a The friendly orange glow, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Brian Dear) data view (longtime tech startup entrepreneur and founder of companies including Coconut Computing, FlatWorks, Eventful, and Nettle. He has also worked at a variety of dot-com companies including MP3 and eBay. He worked in the field of computer-based education for eight years, including five on the PLATO system. He has written for Educational Technology, BYTE, IEEE Expert, and the San Diego Reader. He lives with his wife in Santa Fe, New Mexico) publisher information (b. Feb. 14, 1961) |
| 670 | __ |a Author’s linkedIn page, March 27, 2017 |b (Brian Dear; internet entrepreneur; author; Tesla Owner; ed. U Cal, San Diego; lives in Santa Fe Area) |
PERSONAL
Born February 14, 1961; married.
EDUCATION:Attended the University of Delaware and the University of California, San Diego.
ADDRESS
- Home - Santa Fe, NM; La Jolla, CA.
CAREER
Entrepreneur and writer. Former employee of companies, including MP3, RealNetworks, Hazel, and eBay. Founder of companies, including Nettle, Eventful, FlatWorks, and Coconut Computing.
WRITINGS
- The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2017
Contributor of articles to publications, including the San Diego Reader, Byte, Educational Technology, and IEEE Expert. Maintains the blog Brian Storms.
SIDELIGHTS
Brian Dear is a technology entrepreneur and writer. He attended the University of Delaware and went on to join tech companies, including MP3, RealNetworks, Hazel, and eBay. Dear is also the founder of companies, including Nettle, Eventful, FlatWorks, and Coconut Computing.
In 2017 Dear released his first book, The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture. In an article he wrote on the Signature website, Dear described his first experience using PLATO. He stated: “When I entered the University of Delaware in 1979 as a freshman, I discovered the campus was full of strange, futuristic computer terminals connected to a system called PLATO. To my utter surprise, PLATO had almost everything we now take for granted. It was full of people online, all of them connecting, collaborating, communicating. I was blown away.” In the book, Dear discusses the origins of PLATO, which stands for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations. It was invented during the 1960s at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. PLATO was initially created to assist teachers, but it was not successful. What it did do well was allow users to connect with one another across locations. Users could interact in chat rooms, create blogs, use primitive forms of emojis, and play games with one another. Dear profiles Don Bitzer, a professor who supervised PLATO’s development. He also includes interviews with users of the program. Dear explains that large tech companies borrowed aspects of PLATO when developing new technologies. He argues that PLATO predated both Arpanet and the Internet. In an interview with Julie McClure, contributor to the Smile Politely website, Dear discussed the lengthy amount of time it took for him to complete the book. He stated: “If you do a serious investigatory, nonfiction book, the way you’re supposed to do it is you write up a proposal, submit it to a publisher, they accept it, and then they give you a nice big fat advance, then you go off for a year or two and do all the research and then you write the book.” Dear continued: “Well I had no book and no idea, but I knew that there was a story, and I was eager to find it and frustrated that no one else was pursuing it. So I basically footed the bill myself to do all the research for years. I would work on the book for a few years, shelve it, then work on a start-up for a few years to make an income and have a day job, then go back to working on the book. … Across thirty-two years, the book probably took eleven years to work on.”
Critics offered mostly favorable assessments of The Friendly Orange Glow. A Kirkus Reviews writer described the volume as “a readable tech history, but it helps to have a background in computers to get the most out of Dear’s account.” Carl Hays, reviewer in Booklist, called it an “entertaining, anecdote-laden account.” “Although bloated with extraneous backstory, long-winded anecdotes, and overstated praise of a dead-end technology, the book offers a lively portrait,” asserted a Publishers Weekly contributor. A critic in ProtoView noted: “The book sheds light on the origins of social networking.” Phil Lapsley, reviewer on the Wall Street Journal website, commented: “In The Friendly Orange Glow, author and technology entrepreneur Brian Dear tells the fascinating story of PLATO, an educational computer system developed during the 1960s and 1970s that was used by tens of thousands of students. Plato astonishes in multiple ways.” Lapsley concluded: “Mr. Dear guesses that he spent about eleven years of solid work on his book over more than thirty years. His diligence shows. Thanks to his meticulous research and conversational writing style, The Friendly Orange Glow is an enjoyable and authoritative treatment of an important piece of our social and technological heritage.” “The story he tells is both intriguing and a familiar one in the history of technology: a set of determined visionaries break down barriers to make way for a brilliant advance. What differentiates The Friendly Orange Glow is that the vision behind PLATO ultimately failed,” wrote Sharon Weinberger on the Nature website. Weinberger also stated: “Although it’s hard to accept Dear’s contention that PLATO was a jet in a Wright-brothers scenario, his prodigious research makes this book a worthy addition to the history of computer science. The narrative suffers from extended quotes at times, but the story shines through—a fascinating tale of missed opportunities and blind spots.” Steve Donoghue, contributor to the Open Letters Monthly website, suggested: “The Friendly Orange Glow does exactly what it’s delightfully partisan author claims: it restores to the narrative a largely-overlooked chapter from the early years of computing. That alone would be reason enough to read the book. Dear’s writing verve is an extra bonus, not always provided by tech-writers and much appreciated by the lay reader.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2017, Carl Hays, review of The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, p. 3.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of The Friendly Orange Glow.
ProtoView, December, 2017, review of The Friendly Orange Glow.
Publishers Weekly, August 14, 2017, review of The Friendly Orange Glow, p. 61.
ONLINE
Brian Storms, http://www.brianstorms.com/ (May 22, 2018), author website.
Computer History, http://www.computerhistory.org/ (May 22, 2018), author profile.
Nature Online, https://www.nature.com/ (November 22, 2017), Sharon Weinberger, review of The Friendly Orange Glow.
Open Letters Monthly, https://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (November 21, 2017), Steve Donoghue, review of The Friendly Orange Glow.
Signature, http://www.signature-reads.com/ (November 14, 2017), article by author.
Smile Politely, http://www.smilepolitely.com/ (November 9, 2017), Julie McClure, author interview and review of The Friendly Orange Glow.
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (December 8, 2017), Phil Lapsley, review of The Friendly Orange Glow.
- Brian Storms - http://www.brianstorms.com/about.html
"brianstorms.com" is Brian Dear's web log. I am based in La Jolla, California.
I do startups. I co-founded Coconut Computing, Inc. in 1987. We built COCONET, a way-before-its-time Unix-based system for running online services (before the web). Online display ads, instant messaging, discussion forums, email, movie showtime listings, multimedia support, an extensive API enabling one to build any kind of custom app with database integration, and the whole thing ran in hi-res graphics at high speed over 1200 and 2400bps modems. Eventually we offered Mac and Windows clients. Peapod was our major customer; the Peapod service ran on COCONET technology for years. Sold company in 1995. Worked at RealNetworks in Seattle for a while, then started Flatworks, the first online store for LCD displays back when a 20-inch monitor still cost $5000. Then joined MP3.com, worked there for 2 years, then joined Eazel in Silicon Valley. Then worked at eBay, founding its eBay Design Labs organization. Then started Eventful (originally EVDB), in San Diego. I invented the "Demand it!" capability and am proud of that, but embarassed at what the current management of Eventful has done to Demand it!. What was supposed to be a grass-roots power-to-the-people tool enabling people to "demand" an event (concert, film screening, book igning, whatever) in their town, with no hassle and no middlemen, has become something that in my view is, shall we say, less pure and more Hollywood. For the record that's the vision I had for it. I co-founded Nettle in 2010.
I got my start in computers in 1977 in high school, but really got my start on PLATO in 1979. I am writing a book about the PLATO system.
Return to the brianstorms home page.
- Computer History - http://www.computerhistory.org/events/bio/Brian,Dear
Brian Dear
Brian Dear
Founder, PLATO History FoundationBrian Dear is author of the upcoming book The Friendly Orange Glow, scheduled for release in late 2010. It is the first book ever to tell the story of the PLATO system, its creators and users, and its seminal online community that emerged in the early 1970s. The book is the result of more than 20 years of research, including conducting over 400 interviews and amassing a large archive of clippings, reports, books, articles, recordings, and other documents. In addition to the book, Dear runs a website about PLATO at http://platohistory.org. Dear first became a user of the PLATO system in 1979 at the University of Delaware.
Dear is also Founder and Chairman of San Diego-based Eventful, Inc., makers of Eventful.com, the world's largest events search engine, dedicated to helping people discover, share, track, and demand events they care about. Prior to Eventful, he was founding Director of eBay Design Labs at eBay, Inc. Other past engagements include management positions at Eazel, MP3.com, FlatWorks, RealNetworks, and Coconut Computing, which he co-founded in 1987. Dear's 25-year career has focused on designing and building rich,interactive applications for online communities.
QUOTED: "a readable tech history, but it helps to have a background in computers to get the most out of Dear's account."
Dear , Brian: THE FRIENDLY ORANGE GLOW
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Dear , Brian THE FRIENDLY ORANGE GLOW Pantheon (Adult Nonfiction) $40.00 11, 14 ISBN: 978-1-101-87155-3
An exploration of the computer system that was too far ahead of its time to succeed but whose legacy quietly endures.Techno-critics who worry that computers are turning us into Pavlovian experiments might find ammunition for such an argument in tech entrepreneur Dear's history of PLATO, which grew from B.F. Skinner's theories of programmed learning--the same one that taught pigeons how to peck at levers for rewards in the form of bird seed. The author calls his book the "biography of a vision," and he's quite right to do so, though that vision in practice turns out to be less mechanistic than the purely Skinner-ian one. In fact, PLATO, a learning environment that found a home at the University of Illinois, grew from the dream of "building a computer that could teach" using both natural language and artificial intelligence; from that learning impulse also grew some of the first computer-based communities. Early experiments and programs, Dear writes, are not well-documented, so there's a little learned guesswork in figuring out what code whisperers like Donald Bitzer and Dan Alpert were up to. The story picks up speed and grounding alike when it gets into the heart of the techno-libertarian 1960s, when companies like Xerox and Control Data Corporation began to suss out the possibilities PLATO offered, including some of the first graphics programs. For their part, tech geeks used the platform for additional pleasures, including the earliest Dungeons & Dragons ports. In the end, writes Dear, for many computer aficionados, especially in the 1970s, PLATO became a platform for learning about PLATO: "The system itself was the thing." Those aficionados spun off into other realms, including the first usable graphical interface for the brand-new World Wide Web, which changed the world even as PLATO receded into history--not to mention "Castle Wolfenstein," which has newfound relevance today. A readable tech history, but it helps to have a background in computers to get the most out of Dear's account. As good an account of PLATO as
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we're likely to get--or to need.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dear , Brian: THE FRIENDLY ORANGE GLOW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217544/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=1c1c296b. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217544
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QUOTED: "entertaining, anecdote-laden account."
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The Friendly Orange Glow: The
Untold Story of the PLATO System
and the Dawn of Cyberculture
Carl Hays
Booklist.
114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p3. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture. By Brian Dear. Nov. 2017. 640p. illus. Pantheon, $40 (9781101871553). 303.48.
Anyone who marvels at the rapid ascendance of finger-sensitive smartphone screens in the last decade might be surprised to learn that the touch-screen's development occurred as far back as 1972 and had no involvement from anyone named Jobs or Gates. As tech entrepreneur Dear points out in this absorbing and eye-opening history of the now-defunct computer system dubbed PLATO--an acronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations--touch screens were not the only innovation PLATO's architects inspired. E-mail, multiuser games, and even a primitive form of the Internet all arose as side benefits of the computer-based teaching tool designed mostly for students at the University of Illinois. Among the large cast of characters Dear profiles are PLATO's charismatic supervisor, professor Don Bitzer, and dozens of hacker students who tweaked the system using early chat rooms. While the author's entertaining, anecdote-laden account waxes more than a little nostalgic about the little-remembered program, his audience will mostly be computer geeks and social historians researching the backstory behind cyberculture's flourishing global influence.--Carl Hays
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hays, Carl. "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn
of Cyberculture." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 3. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776005/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b54e9094. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512776005
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QUOTED: "Although bloated with extraneous backstory, longwinded anecdotes, and overstated praise of a dead-end technology, the book offers a lively portrait."
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Friendly Orange Glow: The
Untold Story of the PLATO System
and the Dawn of Cyberculture
Publishers Weekly.
264.33 (Aug. 14, 2017): p61. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
Brian Dear. Pantheon, $40 (640p) ISBN 978-1101-87155-3
Dear, a tech entrepreneur, recounts the development of the little-known PLATO, a teaching platform invented at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the 1960s, in this exuberant history. The computer-based system featured cutting-edge flat-panel plasma displays that glowed orange and were connected by phone lines to a central mainframe computer that supplied lessons and tests to students at far-flung campuses. Supervised by charismatic professor Don Bitzer, PLATO never caught on as a teaching tool, but its fast telecom links and shared apps nurtured an online culture decades before the advent of the web. It fostered a community of enthusiastic teenage hackers, message boards and chatrooms, a primitive news site and blogs, digital hieroglyphics resembling today's emoji, and hundreds of slackers playing addictive multiuser computer games all night. Dear's sprawling re-creation conveys the excitement of technological innovation and the freewheeling eccentricity of this vibrant scene--along with the tediousness of IT procedural nitty gritty ("It was using a -jumpout- command, I jumped right into the middle of, I don't know, was it the 'edit' program or something?"). Although bloated with extraneous backstory, longwinded anecdotes, and overstated praise of a dead-end technology, the book offers a lively portrait of the energy and creativity that a networked world can unleash. Photos. Agent: Regina Ryan, Regina Ryan Publishing Enterprises. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of
Cyberculture." Publishers Weekly, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 61. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717133/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d6bf49ae. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717133
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QUOTED: "The book sheds light on the origins of social networking."
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The Friendly Orange Glow: The
Untold Story of the PLATO System
and the Dawn of Cyberculture
ProtoView.
(Dec. 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text: 9781101871553
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
Brian Dear Pantheon Books 2017
613 pages $40.00 Hardcover QA76.8
Author Brian Dear worked for five years on the PLATO system, an early computer system under development at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois in the 1960s-70s. Here, he offers an insiderAEs perspective on the PLATO teamAEs pioneering work in early versions of innovations such as touch screens, instant messaging, online newspapers, and multiplayer games. He profiles the work of less-known computer pioneers, including many university students, and their vision of computers that offered social interaction, all developed decades before the Internet. The book sheds light on the origins of social networking and on the nature of innovation itself and the cycles of technology. The book contains color and b&w photos. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of
Cyberculture." ProtoView, Dec. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com
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/apps/doc/A520376890/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=502d4ea5. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
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- Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-platos-friendly-orange-glow-1512771287
Word count: 1273QUOTED: "In The Friendly Orange Glow, author and technology entrepreneur Brian Dear tells the fascinating story of Plato, an educational computer system developed during the 1960s and 1970s that was used by tens of thousands of students. Plato astonishes in multiple ways."
"Mr. Dear guesses that he spent about eleven years of solid work on his book over more than thirty years. His diligence shows. Thanks to his meticulous research and conversational writing style, The Friendly Orange Glow is an enjoyable and authoritative treatment of an important piece of our social and technological heritage."Review: Plato’s ‘Friendly Orange Glow’
The primitive Plato computer network was used to, among other things, organize an attempt to impeach Richard Nixon.
A Plato program to teach genetics.
A Plato program to teach genetics. Photo: Paul Tenczar
By Phil Lapsley
Dec. 8, 2017 5:14 p.m. ET
4 COMMENTSIt seems obvious now: People are the “killer app” for computers. Computers are less about computing and much more about communication, connection and community. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, email, instant messaging, multiplayer games and discussion forums—today’s most popular uses of computers are all about human interaction.
It wasn’t always so, nor was it always so obvious. In “The Friendly Orange Glow,” author and technology entrepreneur Brian Dear tells the fascinating story of Plato, an educational computer system developed during the 1960s and 1970s that was used by tens of thousands of students. Plato astonishes in multiple ways. Technologically, it was far ahead of its time, offering its users the flat-panel graphical displays, touch screens and collaborative apps we take for granted today. Socially, its users formed some of the earliest online communities, dozens of years before they would become commonplace. Historically, it is virtually unknown; it is as if, Mr. Dear writes, “an advanced civilization had once thrived on earth, dwelled among us, built a wondrous technology, but then disappeared as quietly as they had arrived.”
Mr. Dear traces Plato’s origins to the 1950s, starting with the psychologist B.F. Skinner’s quest for an “automatic teacher” that would allow students to pace themselves and receive instant feedback—a quest that picked up steam with the 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite and the ensuing U.S. “educational emergency.” People soon realized that this newfangled thing called a “computer” might be the perfect teacher: While expensive, it might, with the right programming and remote terminals, provide teaching precisely tuned to students’ needs.
Plato—Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations—began its life in 1960 at the University of Illinois’s Control Systems Laboratory, a defense lab run by physicists and engineers. Plato’s fathers were the lab’s director, Daniel Alpert, and the project lead, freshly minted Ph.D. Don Bitzer. Mr. Dear likens them respectively to a “venture capitalist” and a “whiz-kid start-up founder.”
Over the next two decades Mr. Bitzer led a crew through numerous challenges. How would they build a system capable of supporting multiple users? How would instructors create lessons without having to become expert computer programmers? How would the remote computer terminals work? How could they be made cost-effectively? Their novel solution to this last problem gives the book its title: The Plato team developed the flat-panel plasma display—which at the time could only produce one color. As a result, Plato terminals bathed their users in a distinctive orange light that users came to call the “Friendly Orange Glow.”
Mr. Bitzer brought a unique management style, one that welcomed help from just about any source—including high-school kids. The Plato lab’s openness was legendary, with an ethos that Mr. Dear summarizes as, “You never knew who was the next Einstein, so encourage everyone to be the next Einstein and increase the odds that the next Einstein would reveal himself.” The result was that key parts of the Plato system were written by users in their late teens and early 20s—the youngest being a 12-year-old who attended school across the street. (The university was unable to pay him until he turned 14 due to child-labor laws.)
Foreshadowing the philosophy of the internet years later, Plato was what today we would call an open platform. Mr. Dear says: “If you wanted to build a lesson on PLATO that reflected your own pet theory, you should be able to go right ahead, as long as other authors could create their own lessons that followed other theories.”
By the early 1970s, Plato was well on its way to achieving its goals, connecting thousands of students across the country with graphical displays and touch screens and providing online lessons ranging from basic arithmetic and reading to advanced subjects like biology and chemistry.
It was around this time that something interesting happened: Its denizens began to adapt Plato not just for education but for communication. A program called Discuss, for example, allowed users to post messages of up to 10 lines of text. It was soon used for organizing an attempt to impeach President Nixon, earning Mr. Bitzer a call from one of his government funding agencies. Another program, Talkomatic, allowed instant messaging between users. Discuss was supplanted by Notes, a more sophisticated discussion system that would grow to have hundreds of topics. Notes was quickly followed by Personal Notes, an email system. Plato even boasted its own electronic newspaper.
And then there were the games. So many games: Spacewar, Mazewar, Moonwar, Dogfight; dungeon adventures like Avatar, “dnd” and Moria; and Empire, a graphical “Star Trek” game. Not only did they support multiple users who could play with or against one another, they allowed users to communicate inside the game via instant messages—all this as early as the mid-1970s.
This connectedness yielded what Mr. Dear accurately terms “the dawn of cyberculture.” Plato’s close-knit community became a nexus of friendship, romance and feuds. Some users were driven to great lengths to get their Plato fix; Mr. Dear describes students hiding in the walls of a classroom behind loosened partitions so as to be able to sneak back in and use Plato terminals undisturbed after closing time. The community expanded throughout the 1970s and early 1980s as other institutions installed their own Plato mainframes and linked them together.
Sensing a business opportunity, industry giant Control Data Corp. licensed Plato from the University of Illinois in the mid-1970s. Sadly, this initially promising attempt at commercialization foundered because of bad luck, poor marketing decisions and a failure to comprehend the onrushing wave of microcomputers such as the Apple II. In some alternate universe, Plato might have been AOL, but 10 years earlier.
By the mid-1980s the system had become outmoded, and the University of Illinois’s Plato lab was shut down in 1993. Plato’s echoes can still be heard, faintly, in such places as “Notes,” IBM’s collaborative software platform (which traces its inspiration directly to Plato), to say nothing of the success of various computer games, many of which were written by former Plato users and programmers.
Mr. Dear guesses that he spent about 11 years of solid work on his book over more than 30 years. His diligence shows. Thanks to his meticulous research and conversational writing style, “The Friendly Orange Glow” is an enjoyable and authoritative treatment of an important piece of our social and technological heritage.
—Mr. Lapsley is the author of “Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell.”
- Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07220-w
Word count: 1193QUOTED: "The story he tells is both intriguing and a familiar one in the history of technology: a set of determined visionaries break down barriers to make way for a brilliant advance. What differentiates The Friendly Orange Glow is that the vision behind PLATO ultimately failed."
"Although it’s hard to accept Dear’s contention that PLATO was a jet in a Wright-brothers scenario, his prodigious research makes this book a worthy addition to the history of computer science. The narrative suffers from extended quotes at times, but the story shines through—a fascinating tale of missed opportunities and blind spots."The internet that wasn’t
Sharon Weinberger weighs up a history of PLATO, a prescient but doomed 1960s US computer network.
Sharon WeinbergerPDF version
Students using the PLATO teaching computers. University of Illinois, circa 1969.Students use PLATO computers in 1969.Credit: Courtesy Univ. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Archives, record series 39/2/20.
The Friendly Orange Glow Brian Dear Pantheon: 2017.
“Imagine discovering that a small group of people had invented a fully functioning jet airplane capable of flying long distances at hundreds of miles per hour, decades before the Wright brothers”. So writes Brian Dear in The Friendly Orange Glow, his history of a computer system that most people have never heard of, but perhaps should have. That system, Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations, or PLATO, brought together dreamers, gamers and engineers in a network at the dawn of the 1960s, long pre-dating the Internet. But was this collective venture really as ahead of its time as Dear claims?
The story he tells is both intriguing and a familiar one in the history of technology: a set of determined visionaries break down barriers to make way for a brilliant advance. What differentiates The Friendly Orange Glow is that the vision behind PLATO ultimately failed. The product created was overshadowed, forgotten by all but its most devoted users, and shut down many years later.
As Dear relates, PLATO’s origins go back to an unexpected source: B. F. Skinner. The pioneer of behavioural psychology was famous for his operant conditioning chamber (also known as the Skinner box), in which animals learned to receive food by pushing a lever. He believed that humans, too, would respond to such conditioning, and soon conceived of a ‘teaching machine’ that would allow students to learn through immediate feedback. His 1954 design, a wooden box housing a rotating-disc contraption, allowed users to move through questions at their own pace. It never quite caught on, but it laid the intellectual foundation for ‘teaching’ computers.
Hear Sharon Weinberger break down the internet that wasn't.
The concept got a second lease of life a few years later, when panic over the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite fuelled renewed interest in education and the nascent field of computers. As Dear reveals, in the late 1950s, the Control Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — a military-funded facility eager to emerge from the shadows of covert work — sought to mesh the digital with learning. Scientists there, particularly physicist Chalmers Sherwin and lab head Daniel Alpert, seized on the idea of a “book with feedback”.
In June 1960, the laboratory launched PLATO under the direction of forward-thinking engineer Donald Bitzer, known affectionately as Bitz. One of its key innovations was a graphics terminal: the “friendly orange glow” refers to the colour of its flat-panel gas-plasma display.
PLATO was in some ways inadvertently revolutionary. The initial system relied on ILLIAC, a 5-tonne “formidable beast” of a computer that took up most of a room. Decades before personal computing, it was not feasible to have a classroom filled with computers, so students worked at terminals hooked up to a mainframe.
Thus PLATO was an early demonstration of time-sharing and networking. Yet in Washington DC, Dear notes, something even more intriguing was taking place. A defence organization, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), was also working towards connecting computers on a single network. Their eventual system, ARPANET, rejected the mainframe paradigm and linked host computers called interface message processors into a network.
A student uses a PLATO terminal at the University of Delaware in 1978.
Undergraduate student David Graper uses a PLATO terminal at the University of Delaware in 1978.Credit: Bill Lynch
ARPANET and PLATO expanded in parallel in the 1970s — and in isolation. This was, Dear notes, “one of the great tragedies in PLATO’s history”. Incredibly, a PLATO terminal was sitting right next to an ARPANET terminal at the University of Illinois, as the latter network was expanding to universities around the country. Dear compares them to “two televisions permanently tuned to different channels”. But the difference was deeper. PLATO was never meant to communicate with other computer systems; it was just connecting terminals across phone lines. And therein lies the fundamental problem with Dear’s thesis. Unlike ARPANET, PLATO was not designed to be a seed that sprouted into a tree of networked computing. Rather, it was a single branch that grew in the wrong direction, and subsequently withered.
So, even as PLATO attracted growing interest for its capacity to connect users, licensing company Control Data Corporation stuck stubbornly to the original educational goals. And PLATO’s designers remained fixated on ‘dumb terminals’ hooked up to a mainframe computer — the ultimate digital dead end. By contrast, engineers at the influential technology-innovation lab Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California, believed that the future lay in desktop computers. In hindsight, the rejection of personal computing by PLATO’s proponents is maddening, Dear points out. He quotes William Norris, head of Control Data Corporation, as saying, “We found the proliferations of Apples and IBMs a roadblock to PLATO.”
Although it’s hard to accept Dear’s contention that PLATO was a jet in a Wright-brothers scenario, his prodigious research makes this book a worthy addition to the history of computer science. The narrative suffers from extended quotes at times, but the story shines through — a fascinating tale of missed opportunities and blind spots. PLATO lumbered along, ignoring the “coming freight train known as the microcomputer revolution” that would overtake mainframes and leave graphics terminals choking in the dust.
Dear also rightly bemoans the failure of teaching machines: online education today focuses on less interactive approaches, such as massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which are far from Skinner’s vision of immediate feedback. As Dear writes: “The field of educational technology, largely ignorant of its own history, seems eternally condemned to repeat itself.” Yet when, in 2015, administrators of NovaNET (as PLATO was rechristened) prepared to take the network offline for good, the users who stayed up late to experience its final moments weren’t there for educational reasons. This was an online community of nostalgics. The digital future was always right there in front of them, glowing orange, if only PLATO’s creators had grasped it.
Nature 551, 438-439 (2017)
doi: 10.1038/d41586-017-07220-w - Signature
http://www.signature-reads.com/2017/11/web-friendly-orange-glow/
Word count: 852QUOTED: "When I entered the University of Delaware in 1979 as a freshman, I discovered the campus was full of strange, futuristic computer terminals connected to a system called PLATO. To my utter surprise, PLATO had almost everything we now take for granted. It was full of people online, all of them connecting, collaborating, communicating. I was blown away."
The Web Before the Web: On Writing The Friendly Orange Glow
By Brian Dear
November 14, 2017
SHAREImage © Shutterstock
Editor's Note:Brian Dear is a longtime tech-startup entrepreneur and the founder of companies including Coconut Computing, FlatWorks, Eventful, and Nettle. He has also worked at a variety of dot-com companies, including MP3 and eBay, and he worked in computer-based education for eight years, including five on the PLATO system. He has written for Educational Technology, BYTE, IEEE Expert, and San Diego Reader.
When I entered the University of Delaware in 1979 as a freshman, I discovered the campus was full of strange, futuristic computer terminals connected to a system called PLATO. To my utter surprise, PLATO had almost everything we now take for granted. It was full of people online, all of them connecting, collaborating, communicating. I was blown away. There were graphics and multiplayer games of every sort. Message forums on every topic imaginable. Email, chat rooms, instant messaging. You could converse with people all over the world. My official major might have been English and journalism, but in reality, I was soon majoring in PLATO.
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iBooksBy 1985 I wanted to write a book. All I had was a title: Gurus: A History of Education’s Future. It would consist of a handful of profiles of prominent visionaries in the field of educational technology like PLATO. It wasn’t clear whose vision of the future was going to turn out to be “the one,” so I interviewed all of these prominent names, including Dr. Donald Bitzer, the founder of PLATO. Each person was convinced their vision was the right one and everyone else’s was wrong. It didn’t take me long to notice that no matter who I was interviewing, my questions kept returning to the topic of PLATO.
That same year I bought a copy of Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The first thing I did when buying such books was search the index for mentions of PLATO. But there were none. The media likewise kept mum. PLATO was light-years beyond what was happening with still-primitive microcomputers, and yet the world seemed determined to ignore it, year after year. PLATO had turned 25 years old in 1985 and still there remained no books on the subject. By 1988 I’d abandoned the Gurus concept and refocused my book on PLATO itself.PLATO was light-years beyond what was happening with still-primitive microcomputers...TWEET THIS QUOTE
The story was too good. Whenever the opportunity arose to interview someone, I pursued it, even if it meant travel. I had no backing from a publisher or a foundation, but I was determined to unearth the PLATO story. I interviewed people on the phone, at conferences, on business trips. Each interview unveiled new clues, new names, new stories that I had to check out. Each person’s story was a piece in a puzzle. What the completed puzzle would look like, I had no idea, but the clues were tantalizing.
The research would take decades, in-between breaks from day jobs. I would work on the book for a year or two, then go back to a day job for a few years, then return to the book for a spell, then another job, repeat, repeat, repeat, straight through to just a few years ago.
Along the way, the World Wide Web was born. In 1996 I set up a website about the book, including listing out my sources. If anyone gave me useful details through an interview or email, I added their name to the list. Over years the list would grow to be many hundreds of names. People all over the world would scan the list, then email me saying, “Hey, you need to talk to me!” or “You need to talk to X, they’re not on your list!” Off I’d go to more interviews.
Transcribing interview recordings took decades as well, resulting in well over five million words of transcripts. By 2010 I started seeing how the puzzle pieces fit together. Themes emerged. A narrative structure began to take shape. By January 2017, the book was done.
Even recent computer history books still lack any mention of PLATO. That’s always fueled my determination even more to finish The Friendly Orange Glow. With the release of the book, my hope is PLATO finally makes it into the mainstream conversation, and that the book becomes the first of many to explore over fifty years of amazing history.
- Open Letters Monthly
https://www.openlettersmonthly.com/book-review-the-friendly-orange-glow/
Word count: 725QUOTED: "The Friendly Orange Glow does exactly what it’s delightfully partisan author claims: it restores to the narrative a largely-overlooked chapter from the early years of computing. That alone would be reason enough to reads the book. Dear’s writing verve is an extra bonus, not always provided by tech-writers and much appreciated by the lay reader."
Book Review: The Friendly Orange Glow
By Steve Donoghue (November 21, 2017) No CommentThe Friendly Orange Glow:
The Untold Story of the PLATO System
and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear
Pantheon, 2017
Tech writer and entrepreneur Brian Dear decides right at the beginning of his epic nerd-fest of a book, The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, that it’s better to seek the glory of Pelennor Fields than to slink around the Halls of Mandos in quiet obscurity. His book is about the young creators of what is in many ways the prototype of the interconnected computing world we all know today, the grinning brainiacs who crafted out of thin air in 1960 something they called PLATO: Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, a primitive computer network loaded by its creators with forerunners of many of the staples of our present-day online life: live chat, instant messaging, chat rooms, email, and even, shudder, emoticons.
Dear has his hands on a great story, and he clearly knows it: The Friendly Orange Glow bounds with energy from its first pages, when those PLATO creators are described in terms more fitting for the Justice League than the varsity AV club:
We are living in the very “shocking future” Alvin Toffler wrote about – warned us about – forty-five years ago. And the history of how we reached this future has been researched, deciphered, studied, analyzed, organized, and disseminated far and wide for long enough that the story has become legend, set in stone. Nerds, geeks, and hackers are no longer outcasts and ridiculed; they’re now sought-after “thought leaders,” many counted among the tens of thousands of recent millionaires and hundreds of billionaires. The list of heroes’ names in the “computer revolution” is long. But there is an equally long list of unknown computer pioneers, the people whose stories fill the pages of this book.
Readers good-natured enough to suppress their snickering at this kind of stuff (hackers may no longer be outcasts – not all of them, not explicitly – but ridiculing geeks is still a recognized Olympic sport, and calling somebody a “hero” because he creates a new Federation-vs-Klingon gaming subroutine says some pretty dim things about what you’d then call somebody who runs into burning buildings to rescue people stranded inside) will love the rest of the book, which charts in loving detail the birth and growth of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the multiple guest-star walk-ons (from Leonard Nimoy to Galatea 2.2 novelist Richard Powers to, of all people, Richard Nixon who, it turns out, hated the proto-Internet as much as he hated everything else), and its eventual spread to include many thousands of users by the 1970s. Dear’s enthusiasm even extends to that least likely of subjects, the topography of the Prairie State:
To be in the great state of Illinois is to be hours away by jet, days by car or rail, from the West or East Coasts, each a thousand miles away. To be in Illinois is, instead, to be in the heart of the fruited plain, that vast prairie with soil so rich you could jam a broomstick into it and leaves would sprout. Some 80 percent of the state’s nearly 58,000 square and famously flat miles are devoted to farming, much of it corn and, in more recent years, soy. Endless farmland surrounds most Illinois cities and towns, which pop up like islands in a sea of green.
The Friendly Orange Glow does exactly what it’s delightfully partisan author claims: it restores to the narrative a largely-overlooked chapter from the early years of computing. That alone would be reason enough to reads the book. Dear’s writing verve is an extra bonus, not always provided by tech-writers and much appreciated by the lay reader.
- Smile Politely
http://www.smilepolitely.com/culture/a_computer_revolution_brian_dear_tells_the_story_of_plato/
Word count: 1768QUOTED: "If you do a serious investigatory, nonfiction book, the way you’re supposed to do it is you write up a proposal, submit it to a publisher, they accept it, and then they give you a nice big fat advance, then you go off for a year or two and do all the research and then you write the book. Well I had no book and no idea, but I knew that there was a story, and I was eager to find it and frustrated that no one else was pursuing it. So I basically footed the bill myself to do all the research for years. I would work on the book for a few years, shelve it, then work on a start-up for a few years to make an income and have a day job, then go back to working on the book. ... Across thirty-two years, the book probably took eleven years to work on."
A computer revolution: Brian Dear tells the story of PLATO
November 9, 2017 / 12:00pm / By Julie McClureIt was called “the friendly orange glow.” And no I’m not talking about the orange lighting of the State Farm Center or Memorial Stadium, I’m talking about the eerie orange campfire-like essence given off by the plasma panel terminals of PLATO. If you’re not familiar with PLATO, which I was not until just a few weeks ago, then you are the reason Brian Dear has undertaken a decades long project of writing a book about it. PLATO stands for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, and it was a computer based project started at the University of Illinois in 1960. Dear, an internet entrepreneur and author of the new book The Friendly Orange Glow, took an early interest in the project and dedicated years to researching and interviewing the people who gave it life. According to Dear, his reason for writing the book was to “give PLATO its due and get it into the conversation and culture. The people that built it and designed it are just as brilliant and important as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Alan Kay.” The book reads like a story, with a unique cast of characters, and folks who have any time invested in the University of Illinois or Champaign-Urbana will find the deep local connections fascinating.
Last week, I spoke with Dear over the phone about the PLATO project and the process of writing the book.
Smile Politely: You describe yourself as a “serial internet entrepreneur. Tell me a bit about your background and how that led to your interest in internet start-ups.
Brian Dear: Actually I blame PLATO for everything. I got my start with computers totally by accident at the University of Delaware when I was a freshman in 1979. I enrolled as an English/Journalism double major; I come from five generations of newspaper publishers and editors. But within a week, I stumbled on the PLATO system which was all over the campus at Delaware, and I just couldn’t believe that things were so futuristic. It wasn’t that it was a fancy system for word processing or number crunching, it was all people. It was a community like we would take for granted today. It blew me away. That was my first real exposure. I worked in the field of computer based education and training for the next five years. Then my wife and I decided to start a company inspired by PLATO, as we were frustrated by things like the Apple Macintosh which was very cool, and the apps were all beautiful and graphical, but when you connected to another computer and went online all of that wonder disappeared and it was scrolling text and very boring. My first start-up was called Coconut, named deliberately and inspired by Apple. We figured you could live longer on a coconut than an apple on an island. Every start up I’ve been involved in since, I still carry a lot of influence from what I saw on PLATO.
SP: You worked for PLATO for a time, correct?
Dear: Basically within a few weeks of being at Delaware, I discovered you could take classes and learn how to program, then you could get a job at the University of Delaware PLATO Project. They were an organization that supported the system, and they were hiring students galore. I thought, "you mean I can get paid to have fun?" This is exactly what had been happening at Illinois for years. In 1980 I made my first trip out to Illinois, and started to do interviews for the book in '85-'86.
SP: Wow, so this has been quite an undertaking.
Dear: If you do a serious investigatory, non fiction book, the way you’re supposed to do it is you write up a proposal, submit it to a publisher, they accept it, and then they give you a nice big fat advance, then you go off for a year or two and do all the research and then you write the book. Well I had no book and no idea, but I knew that there was a story, and I was eager to find it and frustrated that no one else was pursuing it. So I basically footed the bill myself to do all the research for years. I would work on the book for a few years, shelve it, then work on a start-up for a few years to make an income and have a day job, then go back to working on the book. That was the pattern from the late eighties to about 2012. Across 32 years, the book probably took 11 years to work on.
SP: So what exactly is PLATO?
Dear: It was developed at the U of I in 1960, and the original idea was to build a computer that faculty members could create lessons on to teach their students in any subject imaginable. That was the original mission. They started so early that they had to invent everything, including a display for a student to sit down in front of, and that became the gas plasma flat panel display. It’s the same as plasma televisions that we mount on the wall, and there are probably still tons of them all over the campus today. By 1972, PLATO started their installations of them and ended up installing over 1700 terminals over the course of 5-10 years.
PLATO plasma panel (University of Illinois Archives)
Dear: Here’s how PLATO got so interesting. When the high school kids and undergrads got their hands on PLATO around 1973, in the span of 12 months they added everything you could imagine that we take for granted today to the system. (The book details the involvement of local high school students on the PLATO project. Don Bitzer, the project leader, brought in students from Urbana High School, University High School, and eventually Springfield High School to work on the project. According to Dear, this was unusual in this time when labs were typically kept under lock and key and only accessible to “experts”.) Chat rooms, instant messaging, message forums, graphic multi-player games, email, all kinds of communication and suddenly the system was not just for education. What’s notable is that C-U was decades ahead of most of the world in terms of having a digital life. People were obsessed with PLATO, and addicted to it. There was a thriving culture all over C-U in the high schools and on campus that was not really replicated in the same way anywhere else. I think that’s one of the reasons the PLATO story never became commonplace.
SP: This story certainly had a cast of characters. There were so many unique personalities involved in this project. Who are a few of the folks who you feel had the biggest impact on advancing the work of PLATO.
Dear: The first name has to be Don Bitzer. He was the leader of the project, and was hand picked to start it in 1969 when he was just 26 years old. He was considered by his peers and seniors to be a brilliant engineer, and he was also kind of wild and crazy and very ambitious, and set the pace for the PLATO project for the next few decades. He really believed in young people, and had no qualms about bringing in high school kids who were smart and willing to be turned loose. As long as you could build something and contribute, you were welcome. On the administrative side, Dan Alpert played a crucial role in protecting the PLATO project and getting it money for many years. In terms of the young people, there was Bruce Parello, a.k.a “The Red Sweater”, and he represents to me what would happen to millions of people years later who may have been kind of shy in person, but when they were turned loose online they found they could create a persona and flourish. He created News Report, which was one of the first online newspapers that created original content.
Don Bitzer (University of Illinois Archives)
PLATO was basically the precursor to every online experience we’ve become accustomed to today...email, instant messaging, online gaming, and even online dating (Dear met his wife in a chat on PLATO). It even had the addictive factor we opine about today. Turns out we’ve always been wired for this stuff...pun intended.
“Here’s a system that was designed for education, to improve the lives of grade schoolers, high schoolers, and college students, and it ended up wrecking the academic lives of many students who flunked out,” says Dear. “For a lot of kids the most interesting subject on PLATO became PLATO. PLATO represents an interpersonal computer revolution that happened before the personal computer revolution. It took many years for the PCs to evolve into being interpersonal, and yet PLATO was there way before."
Brian Dear will be on campus next Tuesday, November 14 for a book launch at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center. The event will take place in the ballroom from 6:30-8:30 p.m. There will be a presentation by Dear, reading from the book, a Q&A session, and book signings. Illini Union Bookstore will be on hand with copies for sale. You can register to attend here.
Featured photo from The Friendly Orange Glow Facebook page.