PLATO (computer system)

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PLATO in operation - fractional distillation simulation

PLATO ( P rogrammed L ogic for A utomated T EACHING O peration ) was one of the first computer-based teaching and learning systems.

The project was started at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s and developed and expanded over decades. The aim was to teach students independently and simultaneously with different teaching and learning materials.

Basically, PLATO was a learning platform that made more and more functions available to its users over time. At the beginning the PLATO system only had one terminal . In the late 1970s, PLATO already comprised several thousand graphics terminals that were running on almost a dozen different networked mainframes around the world. Many modern concepts of today's multi-user computing were developed and implemented on PLATO, including forums , message boards, online tests, e-mail , chat rooms , visual languages, instant messaging , remote screen sharing and multiplayer games.

Historical background

In 1944, the US government at the time issued the G. I. Bill of Rights (actually Servicemen's Readjustment Act) to make it easier for US soldiers serving in World War II to reintegrate into working life. The regulation now also allowed war participants from sections of the population who had previously had little access to university education or who came from ethnic minorities to study . Prior to the introduction of this law, higher education was reserved for only a minority of the US population.

After this regulation came into effect, some universities tripled their student numbers and the trend towards more enrollments continued to rise. In order to solve the resulting problem of increased numbers of students, the university administrations began to push more and more for computer-aided automation of teaching units. The idea was that if computer-aided automation can increase possible factory production, it must also be able to facilitate academic teaching and bring relief.

In 1958, under the direction of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), a conference on "Computer Education" took place at the University of Pennsylvania , at which studies were presented primarily by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) .

The hour of birth

In mid-1959, Chalmers Sherwin , physicist at the University of Illinois, William Everett Potter , engineer and major general of the US Army Corps of Engineers , the physicist Daniel Alpert and other engineers, mathematicians and psychologists tried the graphic implementation (touch-sensitive systems and graphics screens) of a computer-aided learning system to realize. Despite intensive efforts, no agreement or solution to the graphic problem could be reached.

In order to prevent the project from dying before it was actually implemented, Alpert reported the idea to Donald L. Bitzer , who was a laboratory assistant in the electrical engineering department at the time . He had been dealing with the project for some time and informed Alpert that he was able to build a demonstration system.

Bitzer, who is regarded as the father of the mainframe computer system PLATO, recognized that one of the critical points in the implementation of computer-based education was the graphic requirement or the graphic element (screen system and operation). At the time, ten characters per second was the norm for conventional teleprinters .

In 1960 the first PLATO system "PLATO I" could be operated on a local computer . It included a screen for viewing and a special keyboard for navigation.

Further development

PLATO I, II and III financed themselves almost independently, as the successful operation of the system convinced everyone involved in the continuation and development. Accordingly, in 1967 the National Science Foundation provided the PLATO team with ongoing funding.

Keyboard PLATO IV Terminal 1976

In 1972 a new system called "PLATO IV" was ready for operation. The new PLATO IV terminal was a great innovation. It comprised the orange plasma display invented by Bitzer , in which memory and bitmap graphics were incorporated. The plasma display contained the capability of fast vector lines and ran at 1260 baud (symbol rate), rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. Users could create their own characters.

Compressed air fed a piston-powered microform image selector, which projected colored images onto the back of the screen. The PLATO-IV display also included a 16 × 16 grid infrared touch panel to allow students to answer questions anywhere on the screen.

The PLATO-V terminal in 1981

It was also possible to connect the "PLATO-IV" terminal with peripheral devices . The Gooch Synthetic Synthesizer (named after the inventor Gooch Sherwin ), a synthesizer that provided audio outputs (sound) from PLATO course materials, served as such a peripheral device . This was later replaced by the further development, the Gooch Kybernetic Synthesizer, which was able to realize more complex noises. It was one of the first multimedia experiences. Subsequently, a PLATO-compatible music language was developed for this synthesizer, as well as a compiler for the language, two music text editors, a storage system for music binary files and programs to play the music binary files in real time.

With the advent of microprocessor technology , new PLATO terminals were developed that were less expensive and more flexible than the previous PLATO IV terminals. The Intel 8080 microprocessors in these terminals were able to execute programs locally, similar to today's Java applets and ActiveX controls .

By 1975 the PLATO system was used in almost 150 locations, including a number of high schools, colleges, technical colleges and universities and military facilities. PLATO IV offered text, graphics and animation as components of the course content and already included a shared memory construct in order to be able to send data between different users. This construct was used for chat-like programs as well as the first multi-user flight simulator .

PLATO and the CDC

In 1957, William Charles Norris founded the Control Data Corporation (CDC) , from which the supercomputer manufacturer Cray Research emerged . Norris, who quickly recognized the potential of PLATO IV, showed an increasing interest in it. His interest was ambiguous. On the one hand, he saw the CDC's business development towards a service society instead of a simple hardware manufacturer and, on the other hand, he was convinced that computer-based training would represent a large future market.

Norris was also angry about the social unrest of the late 1960s and had realized that PLATO offered a solution to make higher education accessible to parts of the population who otherwise would never have been able to afford it. In 1971 he set up a new department within the CDC to develop course materials for PLATO. After all, a large number of CDC's in-house training took place via the PLATO system. In 1974, the CDC headquarters was fully equipped with PLATO and in 1976 CDC acquired the commercial rights to PLATO.

CDC stated that 50% of the company's revenues would come from PLATO services by 1985 and even went so far as to place PLATO terminals in subsidiaries of their own shareholders to demonstrate the concept of the system. The concept of a computerized teacher system that equates to a teacher could have been a great success, but the CDC charged $ 50 an hour for access to its own data center to recoup some of the development costs, so this type of teaching is essential was more expensive than traditional lessons. So PLATO was actually a mistake, even though some large corporations and government agencies agreed to invest in this technology.

CDC Plato Network Terminal 1979–1980

An attempt to establish the PLATO system on the mass market was introduced in 1980 as Micro-PLATO, based on a TUTOR system that ran on a CDC "Viking-721" and various home computers. Different versions for Texas Instruments TI-99 / 4A , Atari 8-bit family, Zenith Z-100 and later Radio Shack TRS-80 and IBM personal computers were developed. Micro-PLATO could be used on its own for individual courses or connected directly to the CDC data center for multi-user programs. To make the latter version affordable, the CDC provided its own home link service for $ 5 an hour.

Norris did everything to make PLATO socially acceptable and announced that it would only be a few years before PLATO would be the CDC's largest source of income. In 1986, Norris stepped down as a managing director ( CEO ) and the PLATO service was slowly discontinued. He later claimed that the introduction of Micro-PLATO was one of the reasons the PLATO project was not a success.

Bitzer, on the other hand, saw the failure of the CDC more realistically and saw the blame for it on the internal corporate culture . He found that too high prices and high costs had made the PLATO system unattractive.

International use

The system was used internationally while the CDC was promoting its marketing. South Africa was one of the major users of PLATO in the early 1980s. The PLATO systems were used by the local power supply company Eskom for administration and data processing tasks for power generation and distribution.

Another major user of PLATO was the University of the Western Cape and other educational institutions in South Africa, including Madadeni College in Madadeni Township outside Newcastle.

The South African subsidiary of CDC invested heavily in the development of secondary school curricula based on PLATO. However, as this development approached the final phase, the CDC subsidiary began to dissolve due to financial problems. Partly because of the United States' growing opposition to doing business in South Africa and partly because of the rapid pace of development of microcomputers , a development the CDC failed to recognize in time.

Online communication

Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, its enduring legacy has been the online community created by its communication functions. PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley in 1973 , was among the world's first online message boards and years later became the direct predecessor of Lotus Notes .

By 1976, PLATO had produced a variety of new tools for online communication, including Personal Notes (email), Talkomatic (chat rooms), runtime talk (instant messaging), monitor mode (remote screen sharing) and emoticons .

Late efforts and other versions

One of the CDC's greatest commercial successes with PLATO was an online testing system for the National Association of Securities Dealers (now the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) , a private sector regulatory agency in the United States primarily responsible for the supervision of those involved in the securities industry. responsible for.

With the advent of a ubiquitous global network of test centers and IT certification programs, funded by Novell and Microsoft among others , the online testing business exploded. Pearson VUE was founded by PLATO veterans Clarke E. Porter, Nordberg and Steve Kirk Lundeen in 1994 to further expand the global test infrastructure. VUE improved the business model by being one of the first retail companies to take advantage of the Internet and offer self-service test registrations for sale. The computer – based testing industry continued to grow. Today, professional licensing and educational test sales are important businesses.

Finally in 1989 the CDC sold rights to individual PLATO brands and marketing segments to the newly formed Roach Organization (TRO). In 2000 the TRO changed its name to PLATO Learning. At the end of 2012, PLATO Learning launched its online learning solutions under the name Edmentum. The CDC continued to develop the basic system under the name Cybis in order to be able to serve its existing business and government customers. Cybis was also subsequently sold to University Online. University Online was later renamed VCampus.

The University of Illinois also continued to participate in the development of PLATO, and eventually a commercial online service called NovaNET was set up. Data Protector Express was eventually bought by National Computer Systems (NCS). After several name changes, the system is now known as Pearson Digital Learning.

Cyber ​​Resurrection 1

In August 2004 a version of PLATO that corresponds to the final version of CDC Online was published. This version of PLATO runs on an open source software emulation of the original hardware, called CDC Cyber-Desktop. Within just six months and the word of mouth that followed, this emulation was used by more than 500 former users. Many of the students who had used PLATO in the 1970s and 1980s felt a special social bond with the community at the time through the use of the powerful communication tool.

The PLATO software used on Cyber1 is the final version of the Cybis, with permission from VCampus. The underlying operating system is NOS 2.8.7, the rest of the CDC mainframe business. Cyber1 offers free access to the system, which contains over 16,000 of the original course materials. The average load on the resurrected system is currently around 10-15 users who send personal notes and play online games like Avatar and Empire (a Star Trek-like game) together. This corresponds to more than 1.0 million teaching hours on the original PLATO system.

literature

  • Brian Dear: The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture. Pantheon, 2017, ISBN 978-1-101-87155-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Projects and Communication - History of E-Learning . accessed on January 1, 2014
  2. ^ Plato History - Remembering the future . platohistory.org; accessed on January 1, 2014 (English)
  3. ↑ Historical development of computer-aided teaching and learning systems . ( Memento of the original from April 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Technical University Dresden; accessed on January 1, 2014 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / tu-dresden.de
  4. ^ David R. Woolley: PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community . 1994 (English) Retrieved January 3, 2014
  5. ↑ Courtesy of VCampus Corporation . cyber1.org; accessed on January 3, 2014 (English)