Although it might seem like it’s been around forever, the Instagram app was released exactly fourteen years ago today. It was available only for iPhones at first. An Android app came along two years later, along with a desktop version that works in a web browser. It appeared on Amazon Fire devices two years after that, and, repeating the every-two-years cadence, they released a Windows app in 2016.
For the first five years of Instagram, all the photos were 640 pixels square, which by current standards isn’t particularly high resolution. They raised that to 1080 pixels in 2015, though, setting the stage for the most-liked photo on any media platform: the photo of an egg that was uploaded in January 2019. The whole idea was to get people to click the “like” button — the uploading account is called “@world_record_egg.” It’s still going — by now @world_record_egg has posted four more photos by now (all eggs), and has something approaching 100 million likes all together.
Depending on what you think “social media” is, it’s probably been around since about 1960. The PLATO system was ostensibly an interactive educational system introduced by the Control Data Corporation (CDC). But “it’s for education” is a pretty common trope; that was the original spin put on telephones, television, and personal computing too.
There seems to be some kind of unspoken rule about this; when somebody comes up with a new application of existing technology, the crowd all nods and murmurs “education”. Then they get busy using it for entertainment. On the other hand, as Trip Hawkins (whose Harvard BA is in Strategy and Applied Game Theory) once said, “anybody that thinks there’s a difference between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either one.”
But back to the PLATO system. Remember that this was 1960, and think about its features. Lots of users at the same time, chat rooms, screen sharing, forums, message boards, email, instant messaging, touch screens, multiplayer games, newsgroups, and the ability to let users communicate using little pictures as well as words. Then try to think of any basic computing innovations there have been since then. You can use the PLATO online testing system to submit your answer.
The only real shortcoming of PLATO was availability; you needed a terminal connected to the system, and although there were eventually thousands of them in companies and universities around the world, it wasn’t nearly common enough for just anyone to be able to use it. Besides, CDC at first charged $50 per hour to use the thing, back when $50 was a lot.
CDC was never a company that considered individual people to be worth much attention; they sold big, expensive systems to big organizations. At least they did until the whole operation was sold off for scrap around 1988. But they did take a step in the direction of real social media in 1980 when Micro PLATO was introduced for the personal computers of the era. You could run their software on your Texas Instruments, Atari, Zenith, or Radio Shack personal computer and connect to the CDC network. You still had to pay by the hour, but CDC managed to bring the price down to just $5 per hour. Still a barrier to entry, but not insurmountable.
CDC never got past that original misconception that their system was “for education.” They’d built a whole division of the company to create “courseware,” and their accounting meant that they had to take in at least $300,000 per hour of training to make money. But at the same time, all the innovations in PLATO were being replicated by Xerox (which had seen PLATO around 1970 and started work on the Star computer), Apple (which had seen the Star around 1980 and started work on the Lisa computer).
Meanwhile, in 1971, Mark Andreessen was born. He eventually attended the University of Illinois at the Urbana-Champaign campus and majored in computer science. And guess what — PLATO was marketed by CDC, but it was designed and built by a federally-funded research program called CERL (Computer-based Education Research Laboratory). CERL was based at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) was based there too.
Andreessen worked at NCSA as a student when Tim Berners-Lee published his ideas about standard protocols for what he called the World Wide Web. Andreessen and Eric Bina (who was a professional programmer) used Berners-Lee’s work to create the Mosaic Web Browser — the first web browser that integrated text and images. After Andreeson graduated he moved to California, and eventually the Mosaic Browser became available to everyone as Netscape Navigator. There are a lot more connections to all of this, as you might expect, but that’s basically where you get the ability to click “like” when you see a picture of an egg. Like a lot of the rest of western knowledge and innovation, it all traces back to Plato. Er, I mean PLATO.
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