9 May
2007
9 May
'07
7:44 p.m.
I was thinking about this the other day while mowing the yard (I tend
to do random thinking while doing mindless work) and came to the
conclusion that the internet today provides most of what Plato provided
us those endless years ago, the most notable exception being real time
response.
Part of my realization was the result of my 10 year old sun having
a friend over and the two of them were each on a computer, connected
to an online game website where they were interacting with numerous
other online gamers...
--tom
Jason T wrote:
When contemplating spending some fairly serious coin
on that IBM
system earlier this week, a friend asked "which systems/machines out
there would you pay 'real' money for?" Since I'm not a Big Iron
collector, and I'm used to spending no more than $10-20 on any given
piece, that's a fair question for me. Maybe a Symbolics Lisp machine.
Maybe an original Sun machine, or even a 2-series. A Xerox Alto.
Historical stuff like that. Then I remembered when my high school
class took a trip down to the U of I at Champaign-Urbana for
"Engineering Open House" and I was sat in front of this monstrous
wooden terminal with beguiling orange vector graphics. Only many
years later did I learn what it was, and where it fit in the timeline
of computing (thanks in part to Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream
Machines" books.)
So...who has one? What's become of the remaining infrastructure? I
recently used a Windows Plato client to connect to some descendant of
the system, but I asssume even the back end was running on modern
hardware then, and not old Data General equipment.
-j