PLATO

PLATO, computer-based education system created in 1960 by Donald L. Bitzer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). In addition to being used successfully as a teaching tool, PLATO also spawned one of the first successful online communities. In many ways, PLATO’s development foreshadowed the Internet.

Development

Bitzer, a professor of electrical engineering at UIUC, was interested in matters of literacy. He was inspired to create PLATO when he read that 50 percent of students graduating from high school in the United States were functionally illiterate. In a discussion about literacy, a colleague of Bitzer’s, Chalmers Sherwin, asked whether it might be possible to use computers for education. Bitzer believed that it could be done and set to work to realize the goal of computer-based education by assembling a team of software coders ranging from professors to high-school students.

PLATO was based on a time-sharing computer system, with users and programmers connected to a central mainframe. The first demonstration of PLATO took place on the ILLIAC I computer, which in later versions of PLATO was replaced by a Control Data Corporation (CDC) 1604 computer. The programmers, faculty, and graduate students (and some undergraduates) used programming languages, such as FORTRAN and later TUTOR, to write educational materials.

During the 1960s PLATO was used in a single classroom, but the significance of its development was apparent. In the latter half of that decade, Bitzer and colleagues established the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at UIUC, and work on PLATO continued. By the early 1970s, as the processing power of mainframe computers progressed, PLATO was able to support 1,000 simultaneous users. The connection speed for the workstations that interfaced the mainframe was 1,200 bps (bits per second). PLATO output only text, so the rate of exchange between PLATO users seemed sufficiently fast for communication and education.

The ability to support so many users simultaneously helped facilitate the creation of an online community, which was further made possible by David R. Woolley’s authorship of PLATO Notes, a threaded discussion application that later evolved into Group Notes. Woolley was a student at UIUC at the time and had been working at CERL. He and his colleagues had become frustrated with the process of fixing bugs in PLATO and reporting those fixes. Woolley’s solution was to create a threaded message system that incorporated user IDs and date and time stamping, allowed multiple responses to each entry, and included menus and indices.

PLATO Notes quickly came to be used for a multitude of discussions beyond the fixing of bugs. At about the same time that Woolley created Notes, Doug Brown developed a program called Talkomatic that enabled real-time chat between users. Up to five active participants could utilize a single Talkomatic channel, while any number of users could log in as observers only. Channels could be created by any user at any time. Once a channel was created, however, users could prevent others from joining or observing, thereby creating private chat channels. Soon after the creation of Talkomatic and another real-time chat application, Term-talk, PLATO’s use for online interaction and communication became predominant. Despite that multitude of communication options, PLATO did not initially have an e-mail application with which one could send private messages, but one was released in the summer of 1974.

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UIUC had numerous PLATO terminals in public computer labs and public spaces. What had started as a means of creating educational materials and fostering literacy came instead to foster online communities, distance education, online classified ads, discussion groups on myriad topics, PLATO “celebrities,” and even romance—all features of the Internet in the early 21st century. PLATO users struggled with issues that contemporary Internet users also encounter, such as user anonymity and identity, privacy, and security. Multiuser and single-user games were popular PLATO features. Among the first games were a version of MIT’s Spacewar! and a Dungeons & Dragons-like game called Avatar. Many users spent entire nights and weekends gaming in PLATO labs on the UIUC campus.

The terminals themselves consisted of two parts: a large box, which held a monochrome (amber) monitor, and a keyboard. Later iterations of the terminal came to incorporate a touch-screen interface, and both it and the keyboard were well able to withstand constant use in public places.

PLATO’s development after the early 1970s came to rely on the user community. Those who worked to write applications regularly sought user feedback and input, and in many cases users who had first encountered PLATO by means of a class assignment came to work in CERL. In the mid-1970s CDC licensed the PLATO system from UIUC and began to commercialize it. By the mid-1980s there were more than 100 PLATO systems around the world, most at educational institutions. With further software development, means were devised by which those systems could be linked to one another, and essentially “internetworks” of PLATO systems were operational by the late 1970s. Network gaming—one of the most popular PLATO pastimes—came to be banned (on and off) by university administrators.

The introduction of the personal computer (PC) in the 1980s helped bring about an end to the original versions of PLATO. Networking PCs was less expensive than building out PLATO systems, and the University of Illinois campus system began using NovaNET, a PC-based education system that essentially interfaced with PLATO via PCs instead of PLATO terminals. CDC, which hewed to its mainframe history, was entirely unprepared for the PC’s growth and began a retrenchment. CDC focused PLATO on delivering computer-based instruction and training for the U.S. Department of Defense and other agencies, later renaming it CYBIS and selling it in the 1990s to Vcampus Corp. In 1989 CDC sold the PLATO name to TRO, Inc.

Significance

The creation and evolution of PLATO was significant on two fronts. PLATO’s importance as one of the first, if not the first, networked education and communication systems cannot be overstated. Still, because PLATO spawned one of the first online communities, the social dimensions of PLATO’s use are of equal importance. PLATO—like its closest analogue, The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), whose founders were, it is believed, unaware of PLATO—influenced the development of software applications and structures, as well as the norms to be found in later user communities on the Internet.