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.

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, introduced 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).

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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 the MMORPG Moria, that presaged MUDs and MOOs as well as popular shoot-em-up games like Doom and Quake.

Related Topics:
Empire - Star Trek - Airfight - Microsoft Flight Simulator - Freecell - MMORPG

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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."

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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. Within 6 months by word of mouth more than 500 former users have signed up to use this system. Many of the students who used PLATO in the 1970's and 1980's feel a special social bond with the Community of Users who came together using the powerful communications tools on PLATO (talk programs, records systems, and notes files.)

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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.

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