PLATO: How an educational computer system from the 60s shaped the future

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PLATO: How an educational computer system from the ’60s shaped the future



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Bright graphics, a touchscreen, a speech synthesizer, messaging apps, games, and educational software—no, it's not your kid's iPad. This is the mid-1970s, and you're using PLATO.

Far from its comparatively primitive contemporaries of teletypes and punch cards, PLATO was something else entirely. If you were fortunate enough to be near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) around a half-century ago, you just might have gotten a chance to build the future. Many of the computing innovations we treat as commonplace started with this system, and even today, some of PLATO's capabilities have never been precisely duplicated. Today, we'll look back on this influential technological testbed and see how you can experience it now.

From space race to Spacewar

Don Bitzer was a PhD student in electrical engineering at UIUC in 1959, but his eye was on bigger things than circuitry. “I'd been reading projections that said that 50 percent of the students coming out of our high schools were functionally illiterate,” he later told a Wired interviewer. “There was a physicist in our lab, Chalmers Sherwin, who wasn't afraid to ask big questions. One day, he asked, 'Why can't we use computers for education?'”

The system should be, in Sherwin's words, “a book with feedback.”

The question was timely. Higher education was dealing with a massive influx of students, and with the Soviets apparently winning the space race with Sputnik's launch in 1957, science and technology immediately became a national priority. “Automatic teaching,” as it was conceived, attracted interest both from academia and the military. Sherwin went to William Everett, the dean of the School of Engineering, who recommended that fellow physicist Daniel Alpert, head of the Control Systems Laboratory, assemble a group of engineers, educators, mathematicians, and psychologists to explore the concept. But the group ran into a serious roadblock in that the members who could teach were unable to comprehend the potential technologies required, and vice versa.

via Ars Technica

December 16, 2024 at 11:07AM