If I were to tell you about a computer based learning system that had plasma-touch screens, discussion boards, instant messaging, multiplayer games, and online communities, you might imagine a system developed sometime in the 2000’s. I’m actually referring to the Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operation (PLATO) system which was originally developed in 1960 (Van Meer, 2003). PLATO indeed was far ahead of its time and pioneered many innovations that weren’t popularized until decades later or in some cases never used again (Watters, 2018). The history behind PLATO, I feel, consists of three parts: the hardware, the software, and the business. In this synthesis, I will attempt to outline the merits and critiques of the following articles while telling the storied history of PLATO.

Before I begin the story of PLATO, we have to set the conditions that lead to the political and economic climate that allowed it to thrive. The Second World War gave birth to various technologies and following the end of the war, the baby boom era began. In her article PLATO: From computer-based education to corporate social responsibility, Van Meer (2003) stated that between 1950 and 1975, schools nearly doubled their enrolment which drove the cost for education upward. Educational and political leaders needed a new method to teach an expanding number of students while keeping costs low. Around the same time, in 1957, the USSR had successfully launched the Sputnik I satellite. In fear of falling behind, the US president began the National Science Foundation (NSF) fund, emphasizing the teaching of mathematics and sciences (Van Meer, 2003).

In 1960, with the help of his colleagues, Donald Bitzer developed the first PLATO prototype at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois (Woolley, 1994). PLATO was originally built on an existing computer system called the ILLIAC I which allowed for TV display, human interface key-sets, and memory storage; it was able to serve one user at a time. The hardware would eventually be upgraded in the later iterations of the PLATO system. This is supported by Hochheiser (1988) in an interview with Bitzer stating that only after Control Data Corporation (CDC) provided  the 1604 computer, were PLATO I and PLATO II moved from ILLIAC to a different system. According to Bitzer, it was the 1604 that “got the PLATO III on the road (Hochheiser, 1988, p. 6). The PLATO III was developed sometime between 1963 and 1966 (Van Meer, 2003). It was able to host 70-72 terminals and could operate 20 at a time within the school or 12 remotely. It was also around this time that Bitzer was able to gain NSF funding for the new system, by promising a minimum 300 terminal system. By 1972 the PLATO IV was operational (Van Meer, 2003) and featured a “flat panel plasma touchscreen” (Watters, 2018) and “served 146 locations from the University of Illinois” (Van Meer, 2003). It was this version of PLATO that piqued the interest of CDC, who partnered with the University of Illinois’ Control Systems Laboratory (CSL) and began marketing the system in 1976 (Van Meer, 2003). The PLATO V system would be the first version of PLATO that had an onboard microprocessor called the 8088 microprocessor. After this, popularity of standalone systems increased and CDC focused more the Micro-PLATO standalone system. Unfortunately, the popularity of Micro-PLATO was below expectations, and in 1989, CDC vice president Lawrence Perlman sold the PLATO division (Van Meer, 2003), marking the beginning of the end of the prolific system’s near three-decade run. To this day the system lives on in museums; as the revolutionary foundation of some of the software we still use today.

A communications software, PLATO Notes, was originally developed by young David Woolley in 1973. This simple program was designed to tag user information into secure notes for debugging and eventually evolved into chatrooms called Talkomatic and 1:1 chat messaging named Term-Talk (Woolley, 1994). These communications programs started the concept of online communities where people would be able to meet strangers, develop friendships, and even romanced from hundreds of miles away. Programs like these would eventually evolve and take on new forms. PLATO Notes is the best example of this evolution as three CSL programmers used PLATO Notes as the base to develop a program called Lotus Notes, a popular program used today (Woolley, 1994). Not only this, but as Woolley (1994) explained that the revolutionary hardware and programs were only part of the success of PLATO, and that one of the true masterpieces was a “special purpose programming language called TUTOR” (para. 4). TUTOR, as Watters (2018) and Van Meer (2003) corroborate, was a user-friendly programming language which allowed nearly anyone with a passion for programming to develop educational courseware. As Watters (2018) explained, this was the freedom that the industry needed for open development of programs and courseware without the requirement of advanced programming knowledge; it is this flexibility that is missing from our computer system structures today. One of the downsides appeared when CDC decided to forgo the courseware developed by the University of Illinois, and develop courseware of their own at the cost of as much as $300,000 per course (Hochheiser, 1988). This was one of the costly mistakes that would eventually lead to CDC selling their PLATO division and begin the end of PLATO (Van Meer, 2003).

How PLATO ended is mired in speculation. Watters (2018) claims that PLATO’s end was due to lack of federal funding, however she didn’t provide evidence to support this and as (Van Meer, 2003) stated the PLATO system had approximately $900 Million in investments. Van Meer (2003) alleged that it was CDC’s devotion to corporate responsibility. She made cases similar to (Davis, 1974) outline in his attempts to provide evidence to the determent of the PLATO system. Unfortunately, his referenced evidence seemed more anecdotal, providing one demonstration from one student as a way to show what the collective is experiencing rather than an example of a possible shortcoming of the PLATO system. The lack of corroborating references in his article invites the possibility that these arguments are based on conjecture. As Van Meer (2003) stated, there were many articles and editorials that aimed to sully the PLATO system. This data that Van Meer presented didn’t truly support her claim that it was CDC’s corporate social responsibility which caused the end of PLATO. It also would have been a benefit to know what her definition of corporate social responsibility was in order to compare her presented evidence. I believe the closest truth was from Bitzer, when asked by CDC why he thinks he would have succeeded, Bitzer replied, “start small and spend money carefully. Quit worrying about trying to control all aspects of the products. Have lots of people and universities involved in the process so that you have many active partners contributing their talents and their capital” (Hochheiser, 1988).

The Legacy of the PLATO system is far reaching. The hardware itself stakes a claim in history, innovating technology that wouldn’t be popularized until after the new millennium. The groundbreaking software in PLATO allowed for flexibility and collaboration that we are beginning to adopt today. Finally, the sorted end of PLATO, fraught in conjecture is likely explainable as a series of unfortunate events. Regardless, the PLATO system deserves a place among the pantheons of technological greatness as one of the foundations of technical marvels that we take for granted today.

References

Davis, R. B. (1974). What classroom role should the PLATO ’ computer system play ? AFIPS-Conference Proceedings, 43, 169–173.

Hochheiser, S. (1988). Oral history interview with Donald L. Bitzer. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, (February), 1–29. Retrieved from http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107121

Van Meer, E. (2003). PLATO: From computer-based education to corporate social responsibility. Iterations An Interdisciplinary Journal of Software History, 2(1), 1–22. Retrieved from http://www.cbi.umn.edu/iterations/vanmeer.pdf

Watters, A. (2018). PLATO and the History of Education Technology (That Wasn’t). Retrieved October 3, 2018, from http://hackeducation.com/2018/01/25/plato

Woolley, D. R. (1994). PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community. Retrieved October 2, 2018, from http://thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm#ack