page_title: PLATO (computer system)
section_title: Influences and impacts
hierarchical_section_title: PLATO (computer system) / NSF involvement / Influences and impacts
caption_attribution_description: PLATO V Terminal with plasma display 1981 (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations), PLATO I was ~1960 the first generalized computer assisted instruction system
context_page_description: PLATO was the first generalized computer-assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were originally developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer video games.
  PLATO was designed and built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework to UIUC students, local schools, and other universities. Courses were taught in a range of subjects, including Latin, chemistry, education, music, and primary mathematics. The system included a number of features useful for pedagogy, including text overlaying graphics, contextual assessment of free-text answers, depending on the inclusion of keywords, and feedback designed to respond to alternative answers.
context_section_description: Educators and students used the PLATO System for music instruction at other educational institutions including Indiana University, Florida State University, and the University of Delaware. Many alumni of the University of Illinois School of Music PLATO Project gained early hands-on experience in computing and media technologies and moved into influential positions in both education and the private sector.
  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. One ear-training application, Ottaviano, became a required part of certain undergraduate music theory courses at Florida State University in the early 1980s.
  Another peripheral was the Votrax speech synthesizer, and a "say" instruction (with "saylang" instruction to choose the language) was added to the Tutor programming language to support text-to-speech synthesis using the Votrax.
  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 8080 microprocessors in these terminals made them capable of executing programs locally, and allowed small software modules to be downloaded into the terminal to augment 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 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 graphics-draw program on the Xerox Star workstation), the Charset Editor for "painting" new characters (later translated into a "Doodle" program at PARC), and the Term Talk and Monitor Mode communications programs. Many of the new technologies they saw were adopted and improved upon, when these researchers returned to Palo Alto, California. They subsequently transferred improved versions of this technology to Apple Inc..
  By 1975, the PLATO System served University of Illinois students like Richard Powers and almost 150 other locations from a donated CDC Cyber 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 simulator.
  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 have needed to be scaled down for cost reasons alone.
  In the early 1970s, some people working in the modern foreign languages group at the University of Illinois began working on a set of Hebrew lessons, originally without good system support for leftward writing. In preparation for a PLATO demo in Teheran, that Bruce Sherwood would participate in, Sherwood worked with Don Lee to implement support for leftward writing, including Persian (Farsi), for which the writing system is based on that of Arabic. There was no funding for this work, which was undertaken only due to Sherwood's personal interest, and no curriculum development occurred for either Persian or Arabic. However, Peter Cole, Robert Lebowitz, and Robert
caption: A PLATO V terminal in 1981, displaying RankTrek application, one of the first to combine simultaneous local microprocessor-based computing with remote mainframe computing. The monochromatic plasma display's characteristic orange glow is illustrated. Infrared sensors mounted around the display watch for a user's touch screen input.
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