Plato

PLATO, an apronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operation, 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 (CDC), who provided the machines it ran on. PLATO ran for many years at the U of I, but William Norris's 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.

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.

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In 1972 a new system named PLATO IV was ready for operation. The PLATO IV terminal was a major innovation. It included Bitzer's 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 180 characters per second. The PLATO IV display also included a Touch panel allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen, and a Slide projector that could display microfiche slides from behind the plasma panel.

Related Topics:
Plasma display - Touch panel

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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, an ancestor of Apple's QuickDraw), and the Charset Editor (which edited downloadable bit maps, an ancestor of MacPaint), 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.

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By 1975 the PLATO System served almost 150 locations from a donated CDC 6600, including not only the users of the PLATO III system, but a number of grammar schools, high-schools and various colleges and universities. PLATO IV offered graphics and animation in addition to basic text-based services, and included a messaging service that allowed TUTOR programs to send data between various users. This later service was used both for chat-type programs, as well as the first multi-user flight simulator.

Related Topics:
CDC 6600 - Flight simulator

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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, supporting 512x512 resolution overlayed on a powered color microfiche system for "background graphics" that changed slides with compressed air. Invariably the air tank ran out and the classroom would be rendered inoperable. As a generalized system PLATO would likely need to be scaled down for cost reasons alone.

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