PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations
PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching
Operations)[1][2] was the
first generalized computer assisted instruction system.
Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC
I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several
thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide,
running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in
multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards,
online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture
languages, instant
messaging, remote screen
sharing, and multiplayer
games.
PLATO was designed and built by the University of
Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework
(elementary through university) to UIUC students, local schools, and other
universities. Rights to market PLATO as a commercial product were licensed by Control Data Corporation (CDC), the
manufacturer on whose mainframe computers the PLATO IV system was built. CDC
President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force
in the computer world, but found marketing the system was not as easy as hoped.
PLATO nevertheless built a strong following in certain markets, and the last
production PLATO system did not shut down until 2006, coincidentally just a
month after Norris died.
Contents
- 1 Historic background
- 2 Genesis
- 3 NSF involvement
- 4 The CDC years
- 5 In South Africa
- 6 Online community
- 7 Later efforts and other versions
- 8 Cyber1
- 9 Innovation
- 10 See also
- 11 References
- 12 Further reading
- 13 External links
Historic background
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 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.
Bitzer, regarded as the Father of PLATO, recognized that
in order to provide quality computer-based education, good graphics were
critical. This at a time when 10-character-per-second teleprinters were the
norm. 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.
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.
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 display was a 512×512 bitmap, with
both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. Users could provide
their own characters to support rudimentary bitmap 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 16×16 grid
infrared touch panel allowing students to answer
questions by touching anywhere on the screen.
It was also possible to connect the terminal to
peripheral devices. One such peripheral was 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 16 voices that could be programmed
individually or combined to make more complex sounds. This allowed for what
today is known as multimedia experiences. A
PLATO-compatible music language 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 many
debugging and compositional aids. A number of interactive compositional
programs have also been written.
Another peripheral was the Votrax speech
synthesizer, and a "say" instruction (with "saylang"
instruction to choose the language) was added to the Tutor programming language
to support text-to-speech synthesis using the Votrax.
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.[3]
A PLATO V terminal in 1981 displaying RankTrek
application, one of the first to combine simultaneous local
microprocessor-based computing with remote mainframe computing. The
monochromatic plasma display's characteristic orange glow is illustrated.
Infrared sensors mounted around the display watch for a user's touch screen
input.
With the advent of microprocessor technology, new PLATO
terminals were developed to be less expensive and more flexible than the PLATO
IV terminals. At the University of Illinois, these were called PLATO V
terminals, even though there never was a PLATO V system (the system continued
to be called PLATO IV). The Intel
8080 microprocessors in these 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 graphics-draw program on the Xerox
Star workstation), and the Charset Editor for
"painting" new characters (later translated into a "Doodle"
program at PARC), 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, California. They subsequently
transferred improved versions of this technology to Apple
Inc..
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.
The CDC years
As PLATO IV reached production quality, William Norris
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 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 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.
Using the CDC Plato network, circa 1979-1980, with an
IST-II terminal
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 and IBM Personal Computer. 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.
Norris continued to praise PLATO, announcing that it
would be only a few years before it represented a major source of income for
CDC as late as 1984. In 1986 Norris stepped down as CEO, and the PLATO service
was slowly killed off. 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 Texas
Instruments 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 initially.
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.
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 "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 of 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.
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.
Online community
Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education,
many[who?] consider
its most enduring legacy was to be the online community spawned by its
communication features. 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. By 1976, PLATO had sprouted a variety of novel tools
for online communication, including Personal Notes (e-mail), Talkomatic (chat
rooms), Term-Talk (instant
messaging), monitor mode (remote screen sharing) and emoticons.[4]
PLATO's plasma panels were well suited to gaming,
although its I/O bandwidth (180 characters per second or 60 graphic lines per
second) was relatively slow. By virtue of 1500 shared 60-bit variables per game
(initially), it was possible to implement online
games. Because it was an educational computer system, most of
the user community was keenly interested in gaming.
Many popular multiplayer online games were
developed on PLATO during the 1970s and 1980s, such as Empire (a
multiplayer game based on Star
Trek), Airfight (a
precursor to Microsoft Flight Simulator), Panther (a vector
graphics-based tankwar game, earlier than, but similar in many respects to
Atari's BattleZone), the
original Freecell, and
several games inspired by the role-playing
game Dungeons & Dragons, including dnd and Rogue. Moria, Dry Gulch (a
western-style variation), and Bugs-n-Drugs (a medical variation) — these
all presaged MUDs (Multi-User
Domains) and MOOs (MUDs,
Object Oriented) as well as popular first-person shooters like Doom and Quake, and MMORPGs (Massively
multiplayer online role-playing game) like Everquest and World
of Warcraft. Avatar, PLATO's
most popular game, is one of the world's first MUDs and has over 1 million
hours of use.[citation needed]
These communication tools and games formed the basis for
an online community of thousands of PLATO users, which lasted for well over
twenty years.[5] PLATO's
games became so popular that a program called "The Enforcer" was
written to run as a background process to regulate or disable game play at most
sites and times – a precursor to parental-style control systems that regulate
access based on content rather than security considerations.
In September 2006 the Federal Aviation
Administration retired its PLATO system, the last system that ran the
PLATO software system on a CDC Cyber mainframe, from active duty. Existing
PLATO-like systems now include NovaNET[6] and Cyber1.org.
By early 1976, the original PLATO IV system had 950
terminals giving access to more than 3500 contact hours of courseware, and additional
systems were in operation at CDC and Florida State University.[7] Eventually,
over 12,000 contact hours of courseware was developed, much of it developed by
university faculty for higher education.[citation needed] PLATO
courseware covers a full range of high-school and college courses, as well as
topics such as reading skills, family planning, Lamaze training
and home budgeting.[citation needed] In
addition, authors at the University of Illinois School of Basic Medical
Sciences (now, the College of Medicine
at Urbana-Champaign) devised a large number of basic science lessons and a
self-testing system for first-year students.[8][9] However the
most popular "courseware" remained their multi-user games and role-playing video games such as dnd,
although it appears CDC was uninterested in this market.[citation needed] 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.
Later efforts and other
versions
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.[10]
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.[11] 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[12] 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.
CDC eventually sold the "PLATO" trademark and
some courseware marketing segment rights to the newly formed The Roach
Organization (TRO) in 1989. In 2000 TRO changed their name to PLATO Learning
and continue to sell and service PLATO courseware running on PCs. In late 2012,
PLATO Learning brought its online learning solutions to market under the name
Edmentum.[13]
CDC continued development of the basic system under the
name CYBIS (CYber-Based Instructional System) after selling the trademarks to
Roach, in order to service their commercial and government customers. CDC later
sold off their CYBIS business to University Online, which was a descendant of
IMSATT. University Online was later renamed to VCampus.
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 (NCS). Shortly after that, NCS was bought
by Pearson, and after several name
changes now operates as Pearson Digital Learning.
Cyber1
In August 2004, a version of PLATO[14]
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed] 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.[14]
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