PLATO

Innovations

PLATO was either the first or an earlier example of many now-common technologies:

Hardware

Plasma display (PLATO IV), c. 1964. Donald Bitzer

Touchscreen (PLATO IV), c. 1964. Donald Bitzer

Gooch Synthetic Woodwind (music device for the terminal), c. 1972

Display graphics

Charset Editor (bitmapped picture drawing program) storing in downloadable fonts.

Show Display Mode (graphics application generator (TUTOR)), 1975.

Online communities

Pad (General-purpose computer message board), 1973

Notesfiles (precursor to newsgroups), 1973.

Talkomatic (real-time text-based chat, with six rooms each allowing five participants), 1973

Term-talk (1:1 chat)

Screen software sharing: Monitor Mode, 1974, used by instructors to help students, precursor of Timbuktu.

Common computer game genres, including many early realtime multi-player games

Multiplayer games

Spacewar! (Multiplayer space battle game), c. 1969. Rick Blomme

History

Impetus

Before the 1944 G.I. Bill that provided free college education to World War II veterans, higher education was limited to a minority of the US population, though only 9% of the population was in the military. The trend towards greater enrollment was notable by the early 1950s, and the problem of providing instruction for the many new students was a serious concern to university administrators. To wit, if computerized automation increased factory production, it could do the same for academic instruction.

The USSR's 1957 launching of the Sputnik I artificial satellite energized the United States' government into spending more on science and engineering education. In 1958, the U.S. Air Force's Office of Scientific Research had a conference about the topic of computer instruction at the University of Pennsylvania; interested parties, notably IBM, presented studies.

Genesis

Around 1959, Chalmers W. Sherwin, a physicist at the University of Illinois, suggested a computerised learning system to William Everett, the engineering college dean, who, in turn, recommended that Daniel Alpert, another physicist, convene a meeting about the matter with engineers, administrators, mathematicians, and psychologists. After weeks of meetings they were unable to agree on a single design. Before conceding failure, Alpert mentioned the matter to laboratory assistant Donald Bitzer, who had been thinking about the problem, suggesting he could build a demonstration system.

Project PLATO was established soon afterwards, and in 1960, the first system, PLATO I, operated on the local ILLIAC I computer. It included a television set for display and a special keyboard for navigating the system's function menus; PLATO II, in 1961, featured two users at once, one of the first implementations of multi-user time-sharing.

The PLATO system was re-designed, between 1963 and 1969; PLATO III allowed "anyone" to design new lesson modules using their TUTOR programming language, conceived in 1967 by biology graduate student Paul Tenczar. Built on a CDC 1604, given to them by William Norris, PLATO III could simultaneously run up to 20 terminals, and was used by local facilities in Champaign–Urbana that could enter the system with their custom terminals. The only remote PLATO III terminal was located near the state capitol in Springfield, Illinois at Springfield High School. It was connected to the PLATO III system by a video connection and a separate dedicated line for keyboard data.

PLATO I, II, and III were funded by small grants from a combined Army-Navy-Air Force funding pool. 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 Alpert to set up the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign campus. The system was capable of supporting 20 time-sharing terminals.

Multimedia experiences (PLATO IV)

In 1972, 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). The PLATO IV terminal had several major innovations:

Plasma Display Screen: Bitzer's orange plasma display, incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. The display was a 512×512 bitmap, with both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. It included fast vector line drawing capability, and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. Users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary bitmap graphics.

Touch panel: A 16×16 grid infrared touch panel, allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen.

Microfiche images: 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.

A hard drive for Audio snippets: The random-access audio device used a magnetic disc with a capacity to hold 17 total minutes of pre-recorded audio. It could retrieve for playback any of 4096 audio clips within 0.4 seconds. By 1980, the device was being commercially produced by Education and Information Systems, Incorporated with a capacity of just over 22 minutes.

A Votrax voice synthesizer

The Gooch Synthetic Woodwind (named after inventor Sherwin Gooch), a synthesizer that offered four-voice music synthesis to provide sound in PLATO courseware. This was later supplanted on the PLATO V terminal by the Gooch Cybernetic Synthesizer, which had sixteen voices that could be programmed individually, or combined to make more complex sounds.

Bruce Parello, a student at the University of Illinois in 1972, created the first digital emojis on the PLATO IV system.

Influence on PARC and Apple

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 Insert Display/Show Display (ID/SD) application generator for pictures on PLATO (later translated into a graphics-draw program on the Xerox Star workstation); the Charset Editor for "painting" new characters (later translated into a "Doodle" program at PARC); and the Term Talk and Monitor Mode communications programs. Many of the new technologies they saw were adopted and improved upon, when these researchers returned to Palo Alto, California. They subsequently transferred improved versions of this technology to Apple Inc.

CDC years

As PLATO IV reached production quality, William Norris (CDC) became increasingly interested in it as a potential product. His interest was twofold. 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 troubled 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 a university education.

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 for which the early pioneers in CBT were aiming. 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 as a profitable commercial enterprise, although it did find some use in large companies and government agencies willing to invest in the technology.

PLATO V: multimedia

Intel 8080 microprocessors were introduced in the new PLATO V terminals. They could download small software modules and execute them locally. It was a way to augment the PLATO courseware with rich animation and other sophisticated capabilities.

Online community

Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, perhaps its most enduring legacy is its place in the origins of online community. This was made possible by PLATO's groundbreaking communication and interface capabilities, features whose significance is only lately being recognized by computer historians. PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley in 1973, was among the world's first online message boards, and years later became the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes.

PLATO's innovations in network computing through its visual interface and instant messaging began with the purpose to teach as opposed to developing a social network. As the system grew through the 1960s, PLATO developers added twenty new lines of code to create a subroutine called CONNECT to communicate between terminals. Through CONNECT, several new PLATO features were created, including the ability to comment on university lectures.

By the early 1970s, some PLATO users began using the system for purposes aside from education. Valarie Lamont, a political science student at the University of Illinois, created a program called Boneyard Creek to present a narrative for the history of the stream and allowed users the opportunity to comment and provide feedback on environmental issues and pollution. Stuart Umpleby, one of Lamont's peers, imagined PLATO as a public communication tool. He contributed to the development of DELPHI, a project that would allow for community-based urban planning and forecasting. DELPHI allowed users to share their thoughts on striking issues, how important they view the issues, and their personal probability on the likelihood of outcomes.

In 1973, Doug Brown developed Talkomatic, a live text chat application where up to five active participants could communicate at once. Due to PLATO's infrastructure, the words could appear live on the user's screens as they were typed, and unlimited people could spectate the conversation at once. This built upon the message boards that Woolley designed for PLATO Notes, as Talkomatic was used for casual conversation. Talkomatic gradually grew to the extent that Term-Talk was developed, where the precursor to direct messaging would behave as a miniature "Talkomatic" between two people. During Nixon's Watergate Scandal, Umpleby attempted to create a discussion group on the event, but was not permitted to continue it under threat of losing NSF funding. Despite the ability for free communication on the platform, speech was still monitored by the University of Illinois, bounding the online community under institutional and educational rules. Students often spent time playing games or talking with each other using these features, adding their own emoticons and typing ellipses in their forums. Some of these features are still present today through iMessage and emojis.

Custom character sets

In the early 1970s, some people working in the modern foreign languages group at the University of Illinois began working on a set of Hebrew lessons, originally without good system support for leftward writing. In preparation for a PLATO demo in Tehran, that Bruce Sherwood would participate in, Sherwood worked with Don Lee to implement support for leftward writing, including Persian (Farsi), which uses the Arabic script. There was no funding for this work, which was undertaken only due to Sherwood's personal interest, and no curriculum development occurred for either Persian or Arabic. However, Peter Cole, Robert Lebowitz, and Robert Hart used the new system capabilities to re-do the Hebrew lessons. The PLATO hardware and software supported the design and use of one's own 8-by-16 characters, so most languages could be displayed on the graphics screen (including those written right-to-left).

University of Illinois School of Music PLATO Project (Technology and Research-based Chronology)

A PLATO-compatible music language known as OPAL (Octave-Pitch-Accent-Length) was developed for these synthesizers, as well as a compiler for the language, two music text editors, a filing system for music binaries, programs to play the music binaries in real time, and print musical scores, and many debugging and compositional aids. A number of interactive compositional programs have also been written. Gooch's peripherals were heavily used for music education courseware as created, for example, by the University of Illinois School of Music PLATO Project.

From 1970 to 1994, the University of Illinois (U of I) School of Music explored the use of the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) PLATO computer system to deliver online instruction in music. Led by G. David Peters, music faculty and students worked with PLATO’s technical capabilities to produce music-related instructional materials and experimented with their use in the music curriculum.

Peters began his work on PLATO III. By 1972, the PLATO IV system made it technically possible to introduce multimedia pedagogies that were not available in the marketplace until years later.

Between 1974 and 1988, 25 U of I music faculty participated in software curriculum development and more than 40 graduate students wrote software and assisted the faculty in its use. In 1988, the project broadened its focus beyond PLATO to accommodate the increasing availability and use of microcomputers. The broader scope resulted in renaming the project to The Illinois Technology-based Music Project. Work in the School of Music continued on other platforms after the CERL PLATO system shutdown in 1994. Over the 24-year life of the music project, its many participants moved into educational institutions and into the private sector. Their influence can be traced to numerous multimedia pedagogies, products, and services in use today, especially by musicians and music educators.

Significant early efforts

In 1969, G. David Peters began researching the feasibility of using PLATO to teach trumpet students to play with increased pitch and rhythmic precision. He created an interface for the PLATO III terminal. The hardware consisted of (1) filters that could determine the true pitch of a tone, and (2) a counting device to measure tone duration. The device accepted and judged rapid notes, two notes trilled, and lip slurs. Peters demonstrated that judging instrumental performance for pitch and rhythmic accuracy was feasible in computer-assisted instruction.

By 1970, a random access audio device was available for use with PLATO III.

In 1972, Robert W. Placek conducted a study that used computer-assisted instruction for rhythm perception. Placek used the random access audio device attached to a PLATO III terminal for which he developed music notation fonts and graphics. Students majoring in elementary education were asked to (1) recognize elements of rhythm notation, and (2) listen to rhythm patterns and identify their notations. This was the first known application of the PLATO random-access audio device to computer-based music instruction.

Study participants were interviewed about the experience and found it both valuable and enjoyable. Of particular value was PLATO’s immediate feedback. Though participants noted shortcomings in the quality of the audio, they generally indicated that they were able to learn the basic skills of rhythm notation recognition.

These PLATO IV terminal included many new devices and yielded two notable music projects:

By the mid-1970s, James O. Froseth (University of Michigan) had published training materials that taught instrumental music teachers to visually identify typical problems demonstrated by beginning band students. For each instrument, Froseth developed an ordered checklist of what to look for (i.e., posture, embouchure, hand placement, instrument position, etc.) and a set of 35mm slides of young players demonstrating those problems. In timed class exercises, trainees briefly viewed slides and recorded their diagnoses on the checklists which were reviewed and evaluated later in the training session.

Other efforts

One of CDC's greatest commercial successes with PLATO was an online testing system developed for National Association of Securities Dealers (now the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), a private-sector regulator of the US securities markets. During the 1970s Michael Stein, E. Clarke Porter and PLATO veteran Jim Ghesquiere, in cooperation with NASD executive Frank McAuliffe, developed the first "on-demand" proctored commercial testing service. The testing business grew slowly and was ultimately spun off from CDC 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. Pearson VUE was founded by PLATO/Prometric veterans E. Clarke Porter, Steve Nordberg and Kirk Lundeen in 1994 to further expand the global testing infrastructure. VUE improved on the business model by being one of the first commercial companies to rely on the Internet as a critical business service and by developing self-service test registration. The computer-based testing industry has continued to grow, adding professional licensure and educational testing as important business segments.

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.

In the early 1970s, James Schuyler developed a system at Northwestern University called HYPERTUTOR as part of Northwestern's MULTI-TUTOR computer assisted instruction system. This ran on several CDC mainframes at various sites.

Between 1973 and 1980, a group under the direction of Thomas T. Chen at the Medical Computing Laboratory of the School of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign ported PLATO's TUTOR programming language to the MODCOMP IV minicomputer. Douglas W. Jones, A.B. Baskin, Tom Szolyga, Vincent Wu and Lou Bloomfield did most of the implementation. This was the first port of TUTOR to a minicomputer and was largely operational by 1976. In 1980, Chen founded Global Information Systems Technology of Champaign, Illinois, to market this as the Simpler system. GIST eventually merged with the Government Group of Adayana Inc. Vincent Wu went on to develop the Atari PLATO cartridge.

Other versions

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. Eskom, 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 the "native" 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 Newcastle.

This was perhaps the most unusual PLATO installation anywhere. Madadeni had about 1,000 students, all of them who were original inhabitants i.e. native population 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. Eskom 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.

Cyber1

In August 2004, a version of PLATO corresponding to the final release from CDC was resurrected online. This version of PLATO runs on a free and open-source software emulation of the original CDC hardware called Desktop Cyber. Within six 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 notesfiles) on PLATO.

The PLATO software used on Cyber1 is the final release (99A) of CYBIS, by permission of VCampus. The underlying operating system is NOS 2.8.7, the final release of the NOS operating system, by permission of Syntegra (now British Telecom [BT]), which had acquired the remainder of CDC's mainframe business. Cyber1 runs this software on the Desktop Cyber emulator. Desktop Cyber accurately emulates in software a range of CDC Cyber mainframe models and many peripherals.

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 1980s. The load average of this resurrected system is about 10–15 users, sending personal and notesfile notes, and playing inter-terminal games such as Avatar and Empire (a Star Trek-like game), which had both accumulated more than 1.0 million contact hours on the original PLATO system at UIUC.