Why we are all standing on the shoulders of tech’s giants
But I worry that for most people PLATO is one of those parts of our shared history that we seem to be losing. We’ve mostly forgotten that it was PLATO that inspired Ted Nelson to write his pair of books Computer Lib and Dream Machines that led to his work on the failed Xanadu hypertext project that helped inspire Tim Berners-Lee’s work that gave us today’s World Wide Web.
.. How can we protect that history, in an industry that seems to reinvent itself every decade or so? We can support the work of organisations such as the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, or the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in the UK.
.. It’s a fun read, full of laugh-out-loud anecdotes and cute stories (did you know the cover over the power switch on a rack of computers is called a Molly Guard, after the two year old daughter of an early mainframe operator who managed to shut down a major research centre with a flick of her finger?).