Games - PLATO

	Games - PLATO

PLATO, an apronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, 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 Corporation (CDC), who provided the machines it ran on. PLATO ran for many years at the U of I, but CDC President William Norris' 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.

Background

Prior to the 1960s, university education was limited to a tiny minority of the population. But the future trend to much larger enrollment in higher education was already clear in the early 1950s, and the problem of providing for an influx of new students was a serious concern. A number of people proposed that if the computer could increase the capabilities of the factory via automation, then surely it could do the same for education.

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, and the United States suddenly felt a collective sense of educational inferiority. The result was massive spending on science and engineering education; computer-based education along with it. In 1958 the US Air Force's Office of Scientific Research held a conference on the topic at the University of Pennsylvania, and a number of groups—notably IBM—presented studies on the topic.

PLATO's birth

Chalmers Sherwin, a physicist at the University of Illinois, suggested a computerized learning system to William Everett, Dean of the College of Engineering. Everett recommended that Daniel Alpert, another physicist, convene a meeting on the topic that included engineers, educators, mathematicians, and psychologists. After several weeks of meetings the group was unable to suggest a single design for such a system. Alpert was unhappy with the results, but before announcing their failure he mentioned the meetings to a lab assistant, Donald Bitzer. Bitzer claimed that he had already been thinking about the problem, and suggested that he could build a demonstration system.

Bitzer, regarded as the "father of PLATO", succeeded largely due to his rejection of "modern" educational thinking. Returning to a basic drill-based system, his team improved on existing systems by allowing students to bypass lessons they already understood. Their first system, PLATO I first ran on the locally-built ILLIAC I computer in 1960. It included a TV for display and a special keyboard to navigate the system's menus. In 1961 they introduced PLATO II, which ran two users at once.

Convinced of the value of the project, the PLATO system entered a major redesign between 1963 and 1966. The new PLATO III allowed "anyone" to design new lesson modules using their TUTOR programming language, brainchild of Paul Tenczar. Built on a CDC 1604 which had been given to them for free by William Norris, PLATO III could run up to 20 lessons at once, and was used by a number of local facilities in Urbana-Champaign that could be attached to the system with their custom terminals.

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 Foundation 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 display invention which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The characters were computer-drawn on a 512x512 grid, and the users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary raster graphics. A powered color microfiche system supplied "background graphics" by changing slides behind the see-through display with compressed air. Invariably the air tank ran out and the classroom would be rendered inoperable. The PLATO IV display also included a 16-by-16 grid infrared touch panel allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen.

Early in 1972, researchers from Xerox PARC 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 "Doodle" program at PARC), and the Charset Editor for "painting" new characters, 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, CA.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for PLATO ]

Games - PLATO

Background

PLATO's birth

NSF involvement

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay