PLATO

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For other uses, see PLATO (disambiguation).

PLATO was one of the first generalized Computer assisted instruction systems, originally built by the University of Illinois (U of I) and later taken over by Control Data Corporation (CDC), who provided the machines it ran on. PLATO ran for many years at the U of I, but CDC President William Norris' plans to make it a major force in the computing world and a keystone of corporate social responsibility failed. Although the project was economically a failure and supplanted by other technologies when it was finally turned off in the 1990s, PLATO nevertheless pioneered key concepts such as online forums and message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer online games.

The name PLATO was chosen for its connection to teaching and only later on was an apronym created around it. It was said that PLATO stood for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations but this was later disavowed and PLATO, despite usually being spelled in all caps, officially stood for nothing.

Contents 1 Background 2 PLATO's birth 3 NSF involvement 4 The CDC years 5 PLATO in South Africa 6 The PLATO Online Community 7 Testing 8 Other versions 9 Innovation 10 External links 11 References

[edit] Background

Prior to the 1944 G.I. Bill, which provided free college education to returning World War II veterans, higher education was limited to a minority of the U.S. population. The trend towards much larger enrollment in higher education was clear by the early 1950s, and the problem of providing for an influx of new students was a serious concern. A number of people proposed that if the computer could increase the capabilities of the factory via automation, then surely it could do the same for education.

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, and the United States suddenly felt a collective sense of educational inferiority. The result was massive spending on science and engineering education; computer-based education along with it. In 1958 the US Air Force's Office of Scientific Research held a conference on the topic at the University of Pennsylvania, and a number of groups—notably IBM—presented studies on the topic.

[edit] PLATO's birth

Chalmers Sherwin, a physicist at the University of Illinois, suggested a computerized learning system to William Everett, Dean of the College of Engineering. Everett recommended that Daniel Alpert, another physicist, convene a meeting on the topic that included engineers, educators, mathematicians, and psychologists. After several weeks of meetings the group was unable to suggest a single design for such a system. Alpert was unhappy with the results, but before announcing their failure he mentioned the meetings to a lab assistant, Donald Bitzer. Bitzer claimed that he had already been thinking about the problem, and suggested that he could build a demonstration system.

Bitzer, regarded as the "father of PLATO", succeeded largely due to his rejection of "modern" educational thinking. Returning to a basic drill-based system, his team improved on existing systems by allowing students to bypass lessons they already understood. Their first system, PLATO I first ran on the locally-built ILLIAC I computer in 1960. It included a TV for display and a special keyboard to navigate the system's menus. In 1961 they introduced PLATO II, which ran two users at once.

Convinced of the value of the project, the PLATO system entered a major redesign between 1963 and 1969. The new PLATO III allowed "anyone" to design new lesson modules using their TUTOR programming language, conceived one night in the summer of 1967 by biology grad student Paul Tenczar. Built on a CDC 1604 which had been given to them for free by William Norris, PLATO III could run up to 20 lessons at once, and was used by a number of local facilities in Champaign-Urbana that could be attached to the system with their custom terminals.

[edit] NSF involvement

PLATO I, II and III had been funded by small grants from a combined Army-Navy-Air Force funding pool, but by the time PLATO III was in operation everyone involved was convinced it was worthwhile to scale up the project. Accordingly, in 1967 the National Science Foundation granted the team steady funding, allowing Bitzer to set up the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the university.

In 1972 a new system named PLATO IV was ready for operation. The PLATO IV terminal was a major innovation. It included Bitzer's orange plasma display invention which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The characters were computer-drawn on a 512x512 grid, and the users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary raster graphics. Compressed air powered a piston-driven microfiche image selector that permitted colored images to be projected on the back of the screen under program control. The PLATO IV display also included a 16-by-16 grid infrared touch panel allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen.

In addition, the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind, or "Gooch Box" (named after inventor Sherwin Gooch) as it was called was a peripheral that offered 4 voice music synthesis to provide sound in PLATO courseware. This was later supplanted by the Gooch Cybernetic Synthesizer, which had 16 voices that could be programmed individually or combined to make more complex sounds. This allowed for what today is known as multimedia experiences. In the case of GSW, a PLATO-compatible music language was developed, as well as a compiler for this language, two music text editors, a filing system for music binaries, programs to play the music binaries in real time, and many debugging and compositional aids. A number of interactive compositional programs have also been written.

It was also possible to connect the terminal to peripheral devices. The goal of this system was to provide tools for music educators to use in the development of instructional materials, which might possibly include music dictation drills, automatically graded keyboard performances, envelope and timbre ear-training, interactive examples or labs in musical acoustics, and composition and theory exercises with immediate feedback.^[1]

With the advent of microprocessor technology, new PLATO terminals were developed to be less expensive and more flexible than the PLATO IV terminals. The Intel 8080 microprocessors in PLATO V terminals made them capable of executing programs locally, much like today's Java applets and ActiveX controls, and allowed small software modules to be downloaded into the terminal to augment to the PLATO courseware with rich animation and other sophisticated capabilities that were not available otherwise using a traditional terminal-based approach.

Early in 1972, researchers from Xerox PARC were given a tour of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. At this time they were shown parts of the system such as the Show Display application generator for pictures on PLATO (later translated into a "Doodle" program at PARC), and the Charset Editor for "painting" new characters, and the Term Talk and Monitor Mode communications program. Many of the new technologies they saw were adopted and improved upon when these researchers returned to Palo Alto, CA.

By 1975 the PLATO System served almost 150 locations from a donated CDC Cyber 73, including not only the users of the PLATO III system, but a number of grammar schools, high schools, colleges and universities, and military installations. PLATO IV offered text, graphics and animation as intrinsic components of courseware content, and included a shared-memory construct ("common" variables) that allowed TUTOR programs to send data between various users. This latter construct was used both for chat-type programs, as well as the first multi-user flight simulator.

With the introduction of PLATO IV, Bitzer declared general success, claiming that the goal of generalized computer instruction was now available to all. However the terminals were very expensive (about $12,000), so as a generalized system PLATO would likely need to be scaled down for cost reasons alone.

[edit] The CDC years

As PLATO IV reached production quality, William Norris became increasingly interested in it as a potential product. His interest was two-fold. From a strict business perspective, he was evolving Control Data into a service-based company instead of a hardware one, and was increasingly convinced that computer-based education would become a major market in the future. At the same time, Norris was upset by the unrest of the late 1960s, and felt that much of it was due to social inequalities that needed to be addressed. PLATO offered a solution by providing higher education to segments of the population that would otherwise never be able to afford university.

Norris provided CERL with machines on which to develop their system in the late 1960s. In 1971 he set up a new division within CDC to develop PLATO "courseware", and eventually many of CDC's own initial training and technical manuals ran on it. In 1974 PLATO was running on in-house machines at CDC headquarters in Minneapolis, and in 1976 they purchased the commercial rights in exchange for a new CDC Cyber machine.

CDC announced the acquisition soon after, claiming that by 1985 50% of the company's income would be related to PLATO services. Through the 1970s CDC tirelessly promoted PLATO, both as a commercial tool and one for re-training unemployed workers in new fields. Norris refused to give up on the system, and invested in several non-mainstream courses, including a crop-information system for farmers, and various courses for inner-city youth. CDC even went as far as to place PLATO terminals in some shareholder's houses, to demonstrate the concept of the system.

In the early 1980s CDC started heavily advertising the service, apparently due to increasing internal dissent over the now $600 million project, taking out print and even radio ads promoting it as a general tool. The Minneapolis Tribune was unconvinced by their ad copy and started an investigation of the claims. In the end they concluded that while it was not proven to be a better education system, everyone using it nevertheless enjoyed it at least. An official evaluation by an external testing agency ended with roughly the same conclusions, suggesting that everyone enjoyed using it, but it was essentially equal to an average human teacher in terms of student advancement.

Of course a computerized system equal to a human should have been a major achievement, the very concept that the early pioneers in CBT were aiming for. A computer could serve all the students in a school for the cost of maintaining it, and wouldn't go on strike. However CDC charged $50 an hour for access to their data center, in order to recoup some of their development costs, making it considerably more expensive than a human on a per-student basis. PLATO was therefore a failure in any real sense, although it did find some use in large companies and government agencies willing to invest in the technology.

An attempt to mass-market the PLATO system was introduced in 1980 as Micro-PLATO, which ran the basic TUTOR system on a CDC "Viking-721" terminal and various home computers. Versions were built for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, Atari 8-bit family, Zenith Z-100 and (later)Radio Shack TRS-80 & IBM PC. Micro-PLATO could be used stand-alone for normal courses, or could connect to a CDC data center for multiuser programs. To make the latter affordable, CDC introduced the Homelink service for $5 an hour.

In 1986 Norris stepped down as CEO, and the PLATO service was slowly killed off. He tirelessly supported it to the end, announcing that it would be only a few years before it represented a major source of income for CDC as late as 1984. Nevertheless he later claimed that Micro-PLATO was one of the reasons PLATO got off-track. They had started on the TI-99/4A, but then TI pulled the plug and they moved to other systems like the Atari, who soon did the same. He felt that it was a waste of time anyway, as the system's value was in its online nature, which Micro-PLATO lacked (at least to start).

Bitzer was more forthright about CDC's failure, blaming their corporate culture for the problems. He noted that development of the courseware was averaging $300,000 per delivery hour, many times what the CERL was paying for similar products. This meant that CDC had to charge high prices in order to recoup their costs, prices that made the system unattractive. The reason, he suggested, for these high prices was that CDC had set up a division that had to keep itself profitable via courseware development, forcing them to raise the prices in order to keep their headcount up during slow periods.

[edit] PLATO in South Africa

During the period when CDC was marketing PLATO, the system began to be used internationally. South Africa was one of the biggest users of PLATO in the early 1980s. ESCOM, the South African electrical power company, had a large CDC mainframe at Megawatt Park in the northwest suburbs of Johannesburg. Mainly this computer was used for management and data processing tasks related to power generation and distribution, but it also ran the PLATO software. The largest PLATO installation in South Africa during the early 1980s was at the University of the Western Cape, which served a "coloured" population, and at one time had hundreds of PLATO IV terminals all connected by leased data lines back to Johannesburg. There were several other installations at educational institutions in South Africa, among them Madadeni College in the Madadeni township just outside of Newcastle.

This was perhaps the most unusual PLATO installation anywhere. Madadeni had about 1,000 students, all of them black and 99.5% of Zulu ancestry. The college was one of 10 teacher preparation institutions in kwaZulu, most of them much smaller. In many ways Madadeni was very primitive. None of the classrooms had electricity and there was only one telephone for the whole college, which one had to crank for several minutes before an operator might come on the line. So an air-conditioned, carpeted room with 16 computer terminals was a stark contrast to the rest of the college. At times the only way a person could communicate with the outside world was through PLATO term-talk.

For many of the Madadeni students, most of whom came from very rural areas, the PLATO terminal was the first time they encountered any kind of electronic technology. (Many of the first year students had never seen a flush toilet before.) There initially was skepticism that these technologically-illiterate students could effectively use PLATO, but those concerns were not borne out. Within an hour or less most students were using the system proficiently, mostly to learn math and science skills, although a lesson that taught keyboarding skills was one of the most popular. A few students even used on-line resources to learn TUTOR, the PLATO programming language, and a few wrote lessons on the system in the Zulu language.

PLATO was also used fairly extensively in South Africa for industrial training. ESCOM successfully used PLM (PLATO learning management) and simulations to train power plant operators, South African Airways (SAA) used PLATO simulations for cabin attendant training, and there were a number of other large companies as well that were exploring the use of PLATO.

The South African subsidiary of CDC invested heavily in the development of an entire secondary school curriculum (SASSC) on PLATO, but unfortunately as the curriculum was nearing the final stages of completion, CDC began to falter in South Africa—partly because of financial problems back home, partly because of growing opposition in the United States to doing business in South Africa, and partly due to the rapidly evolving microcomputer, a paradigm shift that CDC failed to recognize.

[edit] The PLATO Online Community

Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, many consider its most enduring legacy to be the online community spawned by its communication features. PLATO Notes, created by David Woolley in 1973, was among the world's first online message boards, and years later became the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes. By 1976, PLATO had sprouted a variety of novel tools for online communication, including Personal Notes (email), Talkomatic (chat rooms), and Term-Talk (instant messaging and remote screen sharing).

PLATO's architecture also made it an ideal platform for online gaming. Many extremely popular games were developed on PLATO during the 1970s and 1980s, such as Empire (a massively multiplayer game based on Star Trek), Airfight (a precursor to Microsoft Flight Simulator), the original Freecell, and several "dungeons and dragons" games, including dnd and MMORPG Moria, that presaged MUDs and MOOs as well as popular shoot-em-up games like Doom and Quake. Avatar, PLATO's most popular game, is one of the world's first MUDs and has over 1 million hours of use.

These communication tools and games formed the basis for a thriving online community of thousands of PLATO users, which lasted for well over twenty years. The history of this community has been documented in much greater detail in David Woolley's article "PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community."

In August of 2004, a version of PLATO (see Cyber1.org) from the 1980-1985 period was resurrected online, and word of its reincarnation spread rapidly. This version of PLATO runs on a software emulation of the original CDC hardware. Within 6 months, by word of mouth alone, more than 500 former users had signed up to use the system. Many of the students who used PLATO in the 1970s and 1980s felt a special social bond with the community of users who came together using the powerful communications tools (talk programs, records systems and notes files) on PLATO.

The original PLATO IV system had more than 12,000 contact hours of courseware, much of it developed by college professors for higher education. The knowledge embedded in this computer system is immense, even today.

[edit] Testing

Testing software developed on PLATO was deployed as the first large-scale computer-based testing system, and turned out to be the most financially viable component of the system. The NASD, private-sector regulator of the US securities markets, began using PLATO for securities license testing in the 1970s. The original testing system was built by Control Data analysts Michael Stein, E. Clarke Porter and PLATO veteran Jim Ghesquiere in cooperation with NASD executive Frank McAuliffe using the full power of the PLATO network to provide the first "on-demand" proctored commercial testing service at over a hundred locations in the United States. The testing business grew slowly and was ultimately spun off from Control Data Corporation as Drake Training and Technologies in 1990. Applying many of the PLATO concepts used in the late 1970s, E. Clarke Porter led the Drake Training and Technologies testing business (today Thomson Prometric) in partnership with Novell, Inc. away from the mainframe model to a LAN-based client server architecture and changed the business model to deploy proctored testing at thousands of independent training organizations on a global scale. With the advent of a pervasive global network of testing centers and IT certification programs sponsored by, among others, Novell and Microsoft, the online testing business exploded. Today's market leader, Thomson Prometric, is the direct descendant of the PLATO testing system; the other major company in the market, Pearson VUE, was founded by PLATO/Prometric veterans E. Clarke Porter, Steve Nordberg and Kirk Lundeen in 1994. VUE improved on the business model by being one of the first commercial companies to rely on the Internet as a critical busienss service and by developing self-service test registration. The computer-based testing business has continued to grow, adding professional licensure and educational testing as important business segments. Prometric and VUE among other descendants of the PLATO system validate William Norris' vision of the profitable use of computers in education.

A number of smaller testing-related companies also evolved from the PLATO system. One of the few survivors of that group is The Examiner Corporation. Dr. Stanley Trollip (formerly of the University of Illinois Aviation Research Lab) and Gary Brown (formerly of Control Data) developed the prototype of The Examiner System in 1984.

[edit] Other versions

CDC eventually sold the "PLATO" trademark and some courseware marketing segment rights to the newly-formed The Roach Organization in 1989. In 2000 TRO changed their name to PLATO Learning and continue to sell and service PLATO courseware running on PC's. CDC continued development of the basic system under the name CYBIS (CYber-Based Instructional System) after selling the name to Roach, in order to service their commercial and government customers. The University of Illinois also continued development of PLATO, eventually setting up a commercial on-line service called NovaNET in partnership with University Communications, Inc. CERL was closed in 1994, with the maintenance of the PLATO code passing to UCI. UCI was later renamed NovaNET Learning, which was bought by National Computer Systems. Shortly after that, NCS was bought by Pearson, and after several name changes now operates as Pearson Digital Learning.

CDC, meanwhile, sold off their mainframe CYBIS business to University Online, which was a descendant of IMSATT. UOL was later renamed to VCampus. At the end of 2005, one remaining CDC CYBER mainframe system was still running at the FAA. VCampus granted non-commercial rights to run CYBIS courseware to Cyber1, operating on a CYBER emulator running NOS, CDC's operating system. This followed limited rights to run NOS being granted by Syntegra (BT), which had inherited the remainder of CDC's mainframe business. Cyber1 offers free access to the system, which contains over 16,000 of the original lessons, in an attempt to preserve the original PLATO communities that grew up at CERL and on CDC systems in the 1980's.

PLATO courseware was fairly extensive, covering a full range of high-school and college courses, as well as topics such as reading skills, family planning, Lamaze training and home budgeting. In addition, authors at the School of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Illinois devised a large number of basic science lessons and a self-testing system for first year students.However the most popular "courseware" remained their multi-user games and computer role playing games such as dnd, although it appears CDC was uninterested in this market. As the value of a CDC-based solution disappeared in the 1980s, interested educators ported the engine first to the IBM PC, and later to web-based systems. Today, however, even the web-based versions seem to have disappeared.

[edit] Innovation

• Plasma display, circa 1964, by Donald Bitzer for PLATO IV
• Touch Panel, circa 1964, by Donald Bitzer for PLATO IV
• Show Display Mode, a graphics application generator for TUTOR software, precursor to Apple's QuickDraw picture language editor.
• Charset Editor, an early version of MacPaint for drawing bitmapped pictures stored in downloadable fonts.
• Airfight, circa 1972, a 3-D flight simulator written for PLATO by Brand Fortner; this probably inspired UIUC student Bruce Artwick to start subLOGIC which was acquired and later became Microsoft Flight Simulator.
• Empire, a 30 person multi-player inter-terminal 2-D real-time space simulation, circa 1974.
• Monitor Mode on PLATO, circa 1975, used by instructors to help students, precursor of Timbuktu screen-sharing software.
• Notes, the first general-purpose computer message board, and precursor to Unix Newsgroups, Digital DECnotes and Lotus Notes, 1973.
• Talkomatic, a 6-person real-time chat room (text-based), precursor to Instant Messaging Conferences, 1974
• Term-Talk, precursor to instant messaging, circa 1974
• dnd, 1974-1975, a dungeon crawl game that included the first video game boss.
• Build-Up, 1976 by Bruce Wallace, based on JG Ballard story, the first 3-D walkthru maze game. The maze itself was also 3-D, having holes in the floor and ceiling.
• Panther, circa 1975 by John Haefeli, a 3-D tank simulation that spawned Atari's Battlezone game.
• Think15, circa 1977, 2-D outdoor wilderness quest simulation, like Trek with monsters, trees, treasures.
• Avatar, circa 1978, a 2.5-D graphical Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), a precursor to EverQuest.
• Freecell, circa 1978 by Paul Alfille, which probably spawned the Windows version.
• Mahjong solitaire, 1981 by Brodie Lockard, and was popularised in 1986 by Activision as Shanghai.

[edit] External links

• PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community by David R. Woolley
• PLATO People, A History Book Research Project by Brian L. Dear
• PLATO: From Computer-Based Education to Corporate Social Responsibility by Elisabeth Van Meer
• PLATO RISING - Online learning for Atarians by David & Sandy Small
• Cyber1.org: An online preservation of the PLATO system
• The History of Computer Gaming Part 5 - PLATO Ain't Just Greek by Marty "Retro Rogue" Goldberg
• Yes Computers can Revolutionize Education by Arthur Darak from the Sept/Oct 1977 issue of Consumer Digest

[edit] References