PLATO

PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was a computer-based education system created in the early 1960s by Don Bitzer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). In addition to its success as a teaching tool, PLATO also spawned one of the first successful online communities. In many ways, PLATO's development foreshadowed the Internet.

Bitzer, a professor of electrical engineering at UIUC, was interested in matters of literacy. In a 1997 interview for http://Wired.com, Bitzer noted that 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 him whether it might be possible to use computers for education. Bitzer believed it to be possible, and he and his colleagues at the university founded the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) and assembled a team of software coders ranging from professors to high-school students. Based on a timesharing computer system, PLATO users and programmers connected to a central mainframe. The programmers, faculty, and graduate (and some undergraduate) students used a programming language called TUTOR to write educational materials. The first demonstration of PLATO took place on the ILLIAC I computer.

During the 1960s, PLATO was used in a single classroom. By the early 1970s, as the processing power of mainframe computers progressed, PLATO was able to support 1,000 simultaneous users, albeit initially at a rate of only 1200bps (bits per second). Considering, however, that PLATO output only text, the rate of exchange between PLATO users seemed sufficiently fast for communication and education.

That development was an important piece of the puzzle that led to the creation of an online community. Another important piece came in the form of David Woolley's authorship of PLATO Notes, a threaded discussion application that later evolved into Group Notes, and subsequently became Lotus Notes. Woolley, a 17-year-old university student at the time, had been working at CERL, and 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 as Woolley created Notes, Doug Brown developed a program called Talkomatic that enabled real-time chat between users. Up to five active [Page 376]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 (which was similar to America Online's Instant Messaging application), PLATO's use for online interaction and communication became predominant. Despite this multitude of communication options, PLATO did not initially have an email application with which one could send private messages; one was released in the summer of 1974.

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