PLATO (
Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the first (ca. 1960, on
ILLIAC IThe ILLIAC I , a pioneering computer built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by a US educational institution, Manchester University UK having built Manchester Mark 1 in 1948.ILLIAC I was based on the Institute for Advanced Study Von Neumann...
) generalized computer assisted instruction system, and, by the early 1970s, comprised some 1,000 terminals worldwide. Originally, PLATO was built by the
University of IllinoisThe University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a public research university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the oldest and largest campus in the University of Illinois system....
and functioned for four decades, offering coursework (elementary–university) to UIUC students, local schools, and other universities.
The PLATO project was assumed by the
Control Data CorporationControl Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
(CDC), who built the machines with which PLATO operated at the University. CDC President
William NorrisWilliam Charles Norris was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world...
planned to make PLATO a force in the computer world; the last production PLATO system was shut down in 2006 (coincidentally, just a month after Bill Norris died), yet it established key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games.
Historic background
Before the 1944 G.I. Bill that provided free
collegeCollege is a term most often used today to denote degree awarding tertiary educational institution. More broadly, it can be the name of any group of colleagues, for example, an electoral college, a College of Arms or the College of Cardinals...
education to
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
veterans, higher education was limited to a minority of the U.S. population. The trend towards greater enrollment 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 computerised
automationAutomation is the use of control systems , in concert with other applications of information technology , to control industrial machinery and processes, reducing the need for human intervention...
increased
factoryA factory or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where workers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production...
production, it could do the same for academic instruction.
ficial satellite illustrated the U.S.'s educational inferiority, which was countered with greater spending on science and engineering education and computer-based instruction. In 1958, the U.S. Air Force's Office of Scientific Research had a conference about the topic at the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
; interested parties, notably
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...
, presented studies.---
PLATO's birth
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 suggest a single-design system, yet, before conceding failure, Alpert mentioned the matter to laboratory assistant
Donald BitzerDonald Bitzer, most notably inventor of the plasma display and largely regarded as the "father of PLATO", has made a career of improving classroom productivity by using computer and telecommunications technologies....
, who had been thinking about the problem, suggesting he could build a demonstration system.
Bitzer, regarded as the Father of PLATO, succeeded because of his rejection of modern educational thinking, and returning to a basic drill-based educational system; his team improved existing systems by allowing students to bypass lessons already learned. In 1960, the first system,
PLATO I, operated on the local
ILLIAC IThe ILLIAC I , a pioneering computer built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by a US educational institution, Manchester University UK having built Manchester Mark 1 in 1948.ILLIAC I was based on the Institute for Advanced Study Von Neumann...
computer. It included a television set for display and a special keyboard for navigating the system's function menus; in 1961,
PLATO II, featured two users at once.
Convinced of the value of the project, 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 1604The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The 1604 is known as the first commercially successful transistorized computer. The 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDCs first street address to Cray's former project,...
, given them by
William NorrisWilliam Charles Norris was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world...
, PLATO III could simultaneously run up to 20 lessons, and was used by a local facilities in Champaign-Urbana that could enter the system with their custom
terminalA computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...
s.
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 FoundationThe National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
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 displayA plasma display panel is a type of flat panel display common to large TV displays . Many tiny cells between two panels of glass hold a mixture of noble gases. The gas in the cells is electrically turned into a plasma which then excites phosphors to emit light...
invention which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability and ran at 1260
baudIn telecommunications and electronics, baud is synonymous to symbols per second or pulses per second. It is the unit of symbol rate, also known as baud rate or modulation rate; the number of distinct symbol changes made to the transmission medium per second in a digitally modulated signal or a...
, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The display was a 512x512 bitmap, with both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. Users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary
bitmapIn computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to...
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 panelA touchscreen is a display that can detect the presence and location of a touch within the display area. The term generally refers to touch or contact to the display of the device by a finger or hand. Touchscreens can also sense other passive objects, such as a stylus. However, if the object...
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
synthesizerA synthesizer is an electronic instrument that is capable of producing a variety of sounds by generating and combining signals of different frequencies...
that offered 4 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
multimediaMultimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which only use traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material...
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
VotraxVotrax Inc. , originally known as the Vocal division of Federal Screw Works or just Votrax, was a speech synthesis company located in the Detroit, Michigan area from 1971 to about 1996 It began as a division of Federal Screw Works from 1971 to 1973?...
speech synthesizer, and a "talk" instruction was added to the Tutor programming language to support it.
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.
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 8080The Intel 8080 was an early microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. The 8-bit microprocessor was released in April 1974 running at 2 MHz , and is generally considered to be the first truly usable microprocessor...
microprocessors in these terminals made them capable of executing programs locally, much like today's
Java appletA Java applet is an applet delivered to the users in the form of Java bytecode. Java applets can run in a Web browser using a Java Virtual Machine , or in Sun's AppletViewer, a stand-alone tool for testing applets. Java applets were introduced in the first version of the Java language in 1995...
s and
ActiveXActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components that perform a particular function or a set of functions in Microsoft Windows in a way that is independent of the programming language used to implement them...
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 PARCPARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology....
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 StarThe Star workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. It was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based...
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, CaliforniaPalo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA. It is named after a tree called El Palo Alto...
. They subsequently transferred improved versions of this technology to Apple Inc..
By 1975 the PLATO System served almost 150 locations from a donated
CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
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 simulatorA flight simulator is a system that tries to copy, or simulate, the experience of flying an aircraft. It is meant to be as realistic as possible...
.
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 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 CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
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-99/4AThe Texas Instruments TI-99/4A was an early home computer, released in June 1981, originally at a price of USD $525. It was an enhanced version of the less-successful—and quite rare—TI-99/4 model, which was released in late 1979 at a price of $1,150...
,
Atari 8-bit familyThe Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers manufactured from 1979 to 1992. All are based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU and were the first home computers designed with custom coprocessor chips, giving them the most powerful graphics of any 8 bit computers of their time...
,
Zenith Z-100The S-100 bus, IEEE696-1983 , was an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800, generally considered today to be the first personal computer . The S-100 bus was the first industry standard bus for the microcomputer industry...
and (later)
Radio ShackRadio shack is a slang term for a room or structure for housing radio equipment.-History:In the early days of radio, equipment was experimental and home-built. The first radio transmitters used a noisy spark to generate radio waves and were often housed in a garage or shed. When radio was first...
TRS-80TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The line won popularity with hobbyists, home users, and small-businesses...
&
IBM PCThe IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
. 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 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.
PLATO in South Africa
During the period when CDC was marketing PLATO, the system began to be used internationally.
South AfricaThe Republic of South Africa is a country located at the southern tip of Africa, with a coastline on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. To the north lie Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, to the east are Mozambique and Swaziland, while Lesotho is an independent country surrounded by South Africa.Modern...
was one of the biggest users of PLATO in the early 1980s.
EskomEskom is a South African electricity public utility, established in 1923 as the Electricity Supply Commission by the government of South Africa in terms of the Electricity Act . It was also known by its Afrikaans name Elektrisiteitsvoorsieningskommissie ...
, the South African electrical power company, had a large CDC mainframe at
Megawatt ParkMegawatt Park is the site of the Eskom head office in Sunninghill, Gauteng, South Africa. It includes the Megawatt Park Conference Centre....
in the northwest suburbs of
JohannesburgJohannesburg also known as Jozi or Jo'burg, is the largest city in South Africa. Johannesburg is the provincial capital of Gauteng, the wealthiest province in South Africa, having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa...
. 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 CapeThe University of the Western Cape is a university located in the Bellville suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. It was established in 1960 by the South African government as a university for Coloured people only...
, 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
ZuluThe Zulu are the largest South African ethnic group of an estimated 10–11 million people who live mainly in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Small numbers also live in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique. Their language, Zulu, is a Bantu language; more specifically, part of the Nguni...
ancestry. The college was one of 10 teacher preparation institutions in
kwaZuluKwaZulu was a bantustan in South Africa, intended by the apartheid government as a semi-independent homeland for the Zulu people. The capital, formerly at Nongoma, was moved in 1980 to Ulundi....
, 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.
EskomEskom is a South African electricity public utility, established in 1923 as the Electricity Supply Commission by the government of South Africa in terms of the Electricity Act . It was also known by its Afrikaans name Elektrisiteitsvoorsieningskommissie ...
successfully used PLM (PLATO learning management) and simulations to train power plant operators,
South African AirwaysSouth African Airways is South Africa's flag carrier and largest domestic and international airline company, with hubs in Johannesburg and Cape Town. It is also known in Afrikaans as Suid-Afrikaanse Lugdiens , although this version of the name no longer appears on the airline's livery...
(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
microcomputerA microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. Another general characteristic of these computers is that they occupy physically small amounts of space when compared to mainframe and minicomputers...
, a paradigm shift that CDC failed to recognize.
The PLATO Online Community
Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, many consider its most enduring legacy was 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 NotesLotus Notes is the client side of a client-server, collaborative application developed and sold by IBM Software Group. IBM describes the software as an "integrated desktop client option for accessing business e-mail, calendars and applications on [an] IBM Lotus Domino server."...
. By 1976, PLATO had sprouted a variety of novel tools for online communication, including Personal Notes (
e-mailElectronic mail, often abbreviated as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages, designed primarily for human use...
), Talkomatic (
chat roomThe term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing...
s), Term-Talk (
instant messagingInstant messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.-Overview:...
), monitor mode (remote screen sharing) and
emoticonAn emoticon is a textual face of a writer's mood or facial expression. They are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. The word is a portmanteau of the English words emotion and icon...
s.
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 gameAn online game is a game played over some forms of computer network. At the present, this almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology; but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the internet, and hard wired terminals before modems...
s. 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
EmpireEmpire is the name of a computer game written for the PLATO system in 1973. It's significant for being quite probably the first networked multiplayer arena shooter-style game...
(a multiplayer game based on
Star TrekStar Trek is an American science fiction entertainment series.The original Star Trek was an American television series, created by Gene Roddenberry, which debuted in 1966 and ran for three seasons, following the interstellar adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Federation...
),
Airfight (a precursor to
Microsoft Flight SimulatorMicrosoft Flight Simulator is a flight simulator program for Microsoft Windows, marketed and often seen as a video game....
),
Panther (a vector graphics based tankwar game, earlier than, but similar in many respects to Atari's
BattleZone), the original
FreecellFreeCell is a solitaire based card game played with a 52-card standard deck. Although software implementations vary, most versions label the hands with a number...
, and several games inspired by the
role-playing gameA role-playing game is a game in which the participants assume the roles of fictional characters. Participants determine the actions of their characters based on their characterization, and the actions succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines...
Dungeons & DragonsDungeons & Dragons is a fantasy role-playing game originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. . The game is currently published by Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro...
, including
dnddnd is a computer role-playing game. The name dnd is derived from the abbreviation "DND" from the original role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which was first published in 1974....
and
RogueRogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman. It is generally credited with being the first "graphical" adventure game, and was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, in part due to the procedural generation of game content...
.
MoriaMoria is a dungeon crawl style computer role-playing game first developed for the PLATO system around 1975, with copyright dates listed as 1978 and 1984...
,
Dry Gulch (a western-style variation), and
Bugs-n-Drugs (a medical variation) — these all presaged
MUDIn online gaming, a MUD , pronounced /mʌd/, is a multi-user real-time virtual world described entirely in text. It combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters,...
s and
MOOA MOO is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users are connected at the same time.The term MOO is used in two distinct, but related, senses...
s as well as popular first-person shooters like
Doom and
QuakeQuake is a first-person shooter video game that was released by id Software on June 22, 1996. It was the first game in the popular Quake series of video games....
and
MMORPGMassively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
s like
EverquestEverQuest, often shortened to EQ, is a 3D fantasy-themed massively multiplayer online role-playing game that was released on the 16th of March, 1999. The original design is credited to Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover, and Bill Trost. It was developed by Sony's 989 Studios and its early-1999 spin-off...
and
World of WarcraftWorld of Warcraft, often referred to as WoW, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...
.
AvatarAvatar is a text-based & graphics-based multi-user highly interactive role-playing computer game, created on the University of Illinois's Control Data Corporation PLATO system in the late 1970s. It has graphics for navigating through a dungeon, and text for player status and communication with...
, 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 an online community of thousands of PLATO users, which lasted for well over twenty years. 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 AdministrationThe Federal Aviation Administration is an agency of the United States Department of Transportation with authority to regulate and oversee all aspects of civil aviation in the U.S...
retired its PLATO system, the last system that ran the PLATO software system on a CDC Cyber
mainframeMainframe may refer to one of the following:* Mainframe computer, large data processing systems* Mainframe Entertainment, a Canadian computer animation and design company.* Mainframe is the city that the CGI cartoon ReBoot takes place in....
, from active duty. Existing PLATO-like systems now include NovaNET 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 UniversityFlorida State University is a space-grant and sea-grant public university located in Tallahassee, Florida, United States. It is a comprehensive doctoral research university with medical programs and significant research activity as determined by the Carnegie Foundation...
.. Eventually, over 12,000 contact hours of courseware was developed, much of it developed by university faculty for higher education. PLATO courseware covers a full range of high-school and college courses, as well as topics such as reading skills, family planning,
LamazeThe Lamaze Technique is a prepared childbirth technique developed in the 1940s by French obstetrician Dr. Fernand Lamaze as an alternative to the use of medical intervention during childbirth. Dr. Lamaze was influenced by Soviet childbirth practices, which involved breathing and relaxation...
training and home budgeting. In addition, authors at the University of Illinois School of Basic Medical Sciences (now, the
College of Medicine at Urbana-ChampaignThe College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign is a medical school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.-Faculty:The faculty of the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign includes Nobel prize winner Paul Lauterbur , who is credited with the invention of MRI...
) 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 PCThe IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
, and later to
webThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks...
-based systems.
Later efforts and other versions
One of CDC's greatest commercial successes with PLATO was an online testing system developed for NASD, 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
CDCControl Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
as Drake Training and Technologies in 1990. The system was later ported, with help from
NovellNovell, Inc. is a global software corporation based in the United States specializing in enterprise operating systems such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and Novell NetWare; identity, security and systems management solutions; and collaboration solutions. Together with WordPerfect, Novell was...
, to a LAN-based system. Known today as Thomson Prometric, the company has a number of proctored testing sites in the United States where PLATO-like courseware is used for automated testing. E. Clarke Porter left Thomson Prometric, and along with Steve Nordberg and Kirk Lundeen formed Pearson VUE in 1994. Similar to Thomson Prometric, VUE is internet based.
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
CDCControl Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
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 IVMODCOMP was a small minicomputer vendor that specialized in real-time applications. They were founded in 1970 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and many of their early sales were for tracking and data collection from NASA space probes...
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
AtariAtari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Infogrames Entertainment SA ....
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.
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
VCampusVCampus Corporation, once known as University Online , specializes in providing certification offerings for non-profit, government and profit-based certifications. As University Online, the company was involved in the historically significant PLATO project....
.
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
PearsonPearson Education is an international PreK-20 educational publishing company of textbooks and other educational material, such as multimedia learning tools...
, and after several name changes now operates as
Pearson Digital Learning.
Cyber1
In August 2004, a version of PLATO (see
Cyber1.org) corresponding to the final release from CDC was resurrected online, and word of its reincarnation spread rapidly. This version of PLATO runs on a software
emulationAn emulator in computer sciences duplicates the functions of one system using a different system, so that the second system behaves like the first system...
of the original CDC hardware called
Desktop CYBERDesktop CYBER accurately emulates a range of Control Data Corporation CYBER mainframes and peripherals in software.-History:...
. 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 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.
Innovation
- Plasma display
A plasma display panel is a type of flat panel display common to large TV displays . Many tiny cells between two panels of glass hold a mixture of noble gases. The gas in the cells is electrically turned into a plasma which then excites phosphors to emit light...
, circa 1964, by Donald Bitzer for PLATO IV
- Touchscreen
A touchscreen is a display that can detect the presence and location of a touch within the display area. The term generally refers to touch or contact to the display of the device by a finger or hand. Touchscreens can also sense other passive objects, such as a stylus. However, if the object...
, circa 1964, by Donald Bitzer for PLATO IV
- Answer Judging Machinery, ?date?, a set of about 25 commands in TUTOR that made it easy to test a student's understanding of a complex concept.
- Show Display Mode, 1975, a graphics application generator for TUTOR software, precursor to Apple's QuickDraw
QuickDraw is the 2D graphics library and associated Application Programming Interface which is a core part of the classic Apple Macintosh operating system. It was initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. QuickDraw still exists as part of the libraries of Mac OS X, but has been...
picture language editor.
- Charset Editor, an early precursor to MacPaint
MacPaint was a bitmap-based graphics painting software program developed by Apple Computer and released with the original Macintosh personal computer on January 22, 1984. It was sold separately for US$195 with its word processor counterpart, MacWrite. MacPaint was notable because it could generate...
for drawing bitmapped pictures stored in downloadable fonts.
- Monitor Mode on PLATO, 1974, used by instructors to help students, precursor of Timbuktu screen-sharing software.
- Pad and a few months later, system-defined Notesfiles, 1973, the first general-purpose computer message board, and precursor to Unix Newsgroups, Digital
Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC...
DECnotes and Lotus NotesLotus Notes is the client side of a client-server, collaborative application developed and sold by IBM Software Group. IBM describes the software as an "integrated desktop client option for accessing business e-mail, calendars and applications on [an] IBM Lotus Domino server."...
.
- Talkomatic, 1974, a 6-person real-time chat room (text-based), precursor to Instant Messaging Conferences.
- Term-Talk, 1973, precursor to instant messaging
Instant messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.-Overview:...
.
- Gooch Synthetic Woodwind, circa 1972, A music device for the terminal, precursor to sound cards and MIDI.
- Airfight, 1974, a 3-D flight simulator written for PLATO by Brand Fortner; this probably inspired UIUC student Bruce Artwick
Bruce Artwick was the creator of the first consumer flight simulator software. His original Apple II software was purchased by Microsoft and eventually became Microsoft Flight Simulator...
to start subLOGICThe subLOGIC Corporation is an American software development company. It was formed by Bruce Artwick when he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and later incorporated by Stu Moment....
which was acquired and later became Microsoft Flight SimulatorMicrosoft Flight Simulator is a flight simulator program for Microsoft Windows, marketed and often seen as a video game....
.
- Empire
Empire is the name of a computer game written for the PLATO system in 1973. It's significant for being quite probably the first networked multiplayer arena shooter-style game...
, circa 1974, a 30 person multi-player inter-terminal 2-D real-time space simulation.
- Spasim
Spasim was a 32-player 3D networked computer game by Jim Bowery involving 4 planetary systems with up to 8 players per planetary system, released in March 1974...
, circa 1974, a 32-player first-person 3D space battle game
- Pedit5
pedit5 was the first dungeon crawl video game, written in 1974 by Rusty Rutherford for the PLATO system. The game was executed on a mainframe computer, but played on terminals located elsewhere....
, circa 1974, likely the first graphical dungeon computer game.
- dnd
dnd is a computer role-playing game. The name dnd is derived from the abbreviation "DND" from the original role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which was first published in 1974....
, 1974-1975, a dungeon crawl game that included the first video game boss.
- Panther, circa 1975 by John Haefeli, a 3-D tank simulation and forerunner of Atari's Battlezone
Battlezone is an arcade game from Atari, Inc released in 1980. It displays a wireframe view on a horizontal black and white CRT...
game.
- Build-Up, 1976 by Bruce Wallace, based on a story by J. G. Ballard
James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short story writer. He was a prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction, but his best-known books are the controversial Crash , an exploration of automobile-accident sexual fetishism, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun...
, the first 3-D walkthru maze game. The maze itself was also 3-D, having holes in the floor and ceiling.
- Think15, circa 1977, 2-D outdoor wilderness quest simulation, like Trek with monsters, trees, treasures.
- Avatar
Avatar is a text-based & graphics-based multi-user highly interactive role-playing computer game, created on the University of Illinois's Control Data Corporation PLATO system in the late 1970s. It has graphics for navigating through a dungeon, and text for player status and communication with...
, circa 1978, a 2.5-D graphical Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), a precursor to EverQuestEverQuest, often shortened to EQ, is a 3D fantasy-themed massively multiplayer online role-playing game that was released on the 16th of March, 1999. The original design is credited to Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover, and Bill Trost. It was developed by Sony's 989 Studios and its early-1999 spin-off...
.
- Freecell
FreeCell is a solitaire based card game played with a 52-card standard deck. Although software implementations vary, most versions label the hands with a number...
, 1979 by Paul Alfille, which probably spawned the Windows version.
- Mahjong solitaire
Mahjong solitaire is a solitaire matching game that uses a set of Mahjong tiles rather than cards. It is also known as Shanghai solitaire, electronic or computerized mahjong, MahJong solitaire, solitaire Mahjong and, erroneously, as Mahjong. The tiles come from the four-player game popular in East...
, 1981 by Brodie Lockard, and was popularised in 1986 by ActivisionActivision, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher, majority owned by French conglomerate Vivendi SA. It was founded on October 1, 1979 and was the first independent developer and distributor of video games for gaming consoles. Its first products were cartridges for the Atari 2600...
as Shanghai.
External links
- Two oral history interviews with Donald L. Bitzer, Charles Babbage Institute
The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking.-Activities:...
, University of Minnesota. Bitzer discusses his relationship with Control Data Corporation (CDC) during the development of PLATO, a computer-assisted instruction system. He describes the interest in PLATO of Harold Brooks, a CDC salesman, and his help in procuring a 1604 computer for Bitzer's use. Bitzer recalls the commercialization of PLATO by CDC and his disagreements with CDC over marketing strategy and the creation of courseware for PLATO.
- Oral history interview with Thomas Muir Gallie, Charles Babbage Institute
The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking.-Activities:...
, University of Minnesota. Gallie, a program officer at the National Science Foundation (NSF), describes the impact of Don Bitzer and the PLATO system, grants related to the classroom use of computers, and NSF's Regional Computing Program.
- Oral history interview with Robert E. Morris, Charles Babbage Institute
The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking.-Activities:...
, University of Minnesota. Morris describes his work with the PLATO computer-assisted education system and outlines the interaction and technology transfer that occurred between the University of Illinois and Control Data Corporation.
- University of Illinois Computer-based Education Research Laboratory PLATO Reports, PLATO Documents, and CERL Progress Reports, Charles Babbage Institute
The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking.-Activities:...
, University of Minnesota. Archival collection contains internal reports and external reports and publications related to the development of PLATO and the operations of CERL.
- Control Data Corporation records. Computer-based education, Charles Babbage Institute
The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking.-Activities:...
, University of Minnesota. Computer-Based Education (CBE) series documents CDC’s objective to create, market and distribute PLATO courseware internally within various CDC departments and divisions, and externally.
- The Plato IV Architecture by Jack Stifle
- 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
- PLATO User's Guide, Revised April, 1981, CDC Corporation.
- 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
- Desktop CYBER by Tom Hunter
- Stanley G. Smith and Bruce Arne Sherwood, Educational Uses of the PLATO Computer System, Science 192, 4237 (April 1976), 344-352.