One upon a time, there was a computer network with thousands of users across the world. It featured chat rooms, message boards, multiplayer games, a blog-like newspaper, and accredited distance learning, all piped to flat-panel plasma screens that we

PLATO

September 25, 2019

Enter PLATO’s cave

It was PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), and its original purpose was to harness the power of the still-obscure world of computing as a teaching tool. Developing PLATO required simultaneous quantum leaps in technological sophistication, and it worked—college and high-school students quickly learned how to use it, and also pushed it to do new things.

Despite decades of use at major universities, it all but vanished in the 1980s and from popular memory in the years that followed, a victim of the microcomputer revolution. At its peak, PLATO was surprisingly similar to the modern internet, and it left its DNA in technology we still use today.

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Brief history

5.12 kb: Memory of ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), the early supercomputer that ran the first version of PLATO

64 kb: ILLIAC I’s storage capacity

$995,000: Price of the CDC (Control Data Corporation) 1604 that ran PLATO III

32: Simultaneous users PLATO could support on the 1604

19: Age of the Harvard freshman, Andy Hanson, who wrote the code to support 32 simultaneous users

4: Erdös number of Hanson, currently professor emeritus in computer science at the University of Indiana

512×512: Resolution of PLATO’s plasma touchscreen display

>35: Patents spun off of the PLATO project

11,000: Hours of courseware developed for PLATO

10 million: Hours users spent on PLATO between 1978 and 1985

~20%: Share of those hours devoted to gaming

$900 million: Amount CDC invested in PLATO over two decades

Origin story

Hello, PLATO

After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, leaping ahead of the United States in the space race, the US government immediately invested in computers and science education, leading to the creation of NASA, ARPANET, and PLATO. The University of Illinois, a pioneer in supercomputing (the ILLIAC I had more computing power than all of Bell Labs at the time) got to work on a simultaneous solution. “The first thing [PLATO] needed to do was teach people how to use a computer, via the computer,” Brian Dear writes in The Friendly Orange Glow, his history of the project.

PLATO’s project lead was a brilliant, intense 26-year-old recent PhD, Donald Bitzer, who studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois but credited a course at the Carter Carburetor Company, “the Harvard of carburetor academics,” for his pedagogical inspiration. Bitzer and his colleagues started with a simple idea that still drives digital learning: students worked at their own pace, and the computer gave them feedback. If they got the work right, they moved on; if they got it wrong, they repeated it.

This was a challenge at the dawn of real-time processing. The computer had to track multiple students and deliver immediate feedback. Fortunately, the university was also working on air-traffic control software which, on a certain level, did the same thing: track people in position, provide feedback, guide them to a landing from many different places. “Just think of the students as aircraft and it all started making sense,” Dear writes.

Brief history

1959: Chalmers Sherwin of the University of Illinois’s Control Systems Laboratory floats the idea of a teaching computer.

1960: The PLATO I prototype, an ILLIAC I supercomputer hooked up to a television set, is built.

1961: PLATO II allows for two simultaneous users.

1963: PLATO III debuts, with a maximum capability of 32 simultaneous users.

1965: PLATO is used for a complete college course in library science.

1966: U of I researchers build a 4×4 plasma display.

1972: PLATO IV features a plasma display and LED-based touchscreen.

1974: Bruce Parello begins an online newspaper on the system; Spasim launches, arguably the first 3D multiplayer online game.

1976: Control Data Corporation licenses PLATO for commercial sales.

1979: Medical student Paul Alfille designs the solitaire game FreeCell, made famous by its inclusion on Windows 95.

1981: CDC releases its first desktop, the CDC 110, based around PLATO, for $4,995.

1984: University of Illinois graduate Ray Ozzie begins work on the influential enterprise program Lotus Notes, inspired by PLATO’s Notes function.

1989: CDC sells PLATO.

YouTube

This one weird trick!

The friendly orange glow

Bitzer and his team tried cathode-ray tube monitors to display PLATO’s visual-heavy lessons, but their refresh rate required a steady flow of data. Storage tubes were an improvement, but the image faded quickly as students worked and had to be refreshed.

The solution was a gas-panel display. Despite the team being “very naive” about vacuum physics, as plasma-display co-inventor Robert Willson told Brian Dear, they forged ahead, beginning with a single pixel. That pixel turned into a glass sheet with tiny gas-filled holes (pdf) backed by electrodes. Send electricity to the electrode, the gas reacts, and the pixel lights up. Poof: a friendly orange glow.

Now here’s the trick: the display contained a “sustaining voltage.” After the computer applied the voltage to the pixel, the sustaining voltage kept it lit up until a signal told it to dim. Unlike CRT, the display didn’t require a constant stream of data from the computer to continue displaying an image; it had “inherent memory.” This would be PLATO’s biggest legacy, at least measured by the millions of dollars the University of Illinois made from the patents.

Reuters/Clodagh Kilcoyne

Quotable

“PLATO was my Alexandria. It was my library, it was the place where I could attach myself to anything. And it was also the place—you know, I wrote code before I wrote fiction—where I realized that, where I first saw where careful construction of words, in the right order could create actual things, real data structures that then had behaviors, and acted as objects in this open-ended world.”

—Novelist Richard Powers, quoted in The Friendly Orange Glow

“The thing with the orange glow is it remains to this day the most pleasing color palette I’ve seen, that sort of weird cloudy screen? It’s like… you honestly felt that behind that screen that there was miles of space.”

—Eugene Jarecki, filmmaker and one of the few PLATO users with a terminal in his home

Mabu2/Wikipedia

Million-dollar question

What happened to PLATO?

During the 1970s, PLATO became a robust system. It boasted thousands of hours of lessons, some for accredited courses. College students wrote games for it. The state of Illinois put it to work in prisons. Its Notes app served as an ur-Craigslist for the University of Illinois. Talkomatic was an early chat room. Bruce Parello’s News Report was possibly the first online publication, with 400 readers per day, a substantial number given the limited access. (It even used emoticons.)

But it didn’t fit into the new market created by personal computers. Bitzer’s vision resembled cloud computing, a “million-terminal network” that scaled up PLATO’s mainframe-to-terminal architecture. After PLATO was licensed by supercomputer manufacturer CDC in the mid-1970s, it became more wedded to the ahead-of-its-time idea.

CDC also hewed closely to the educational market. It passed up business-sector opportunities and instead tried and failed to sell to Iran and Venezuela, oil-rich countries with educational-infrastructure needs. PLATO’s greatest commercial successes came at the intersection of business and education, where large companies could afford to spend on highly specific training; Boeing and Merrill Lynch both used the platform.

When the company did produce a microcomputer in 1975 at an impressive unit cost of $1,300, its marketing department suggested selling it for over $8,000, one employee told Brian Dear. When CDC started going head to head with Apple for the domestic educational market, its terminals cost twice as much. Meanwhile, PLATO’s course-creation arm couldn’t rein in development costs without the benefit of university staff. Unable to find a revenue model for its hardware, software, or pedagogical components, PLATO quietly disappeared.

Giphy

Pop quiz

What video-game franchise was started by a PLATO power user?

MinecraftFortniteCastle WolfensteinSuper Mario Brothers

Correct. After cutting his teeth on PLATO, Silas Warner designed the first version for the Apple II in 1981.

Incorrect.

If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email.

Fun fact!

In 1973, as Watergate was revving up, the Nixon administration tried to shut down PLATO—which was heavily reliant on government funding—after teachers and students used the system to talk about impeachment.

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Present, meet past

In 2017, Brian Dear told the story of PLATO to the folks at Google.

take me down this 🐰 hole!

PLATO still lives on the internet that conquered it. You can listen to an album (or two!) of music programmed on it; watch someone play what was possibly the first “dungeon crawl” game, PEDIT5, or the space game Empire; or even use the platform itself at cyber1 (registration required).

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In yesterday’s poll about penmanship, 70% of you professed your love for cursive, 20% said you hate it, and 10% told us that you don’t know how to do it. 💌 John wrote in to say, “I would not hire applicants who were unable to express themselves in essay format using cursive on a sheet of unlined paper using a #2 pencil which they had to sharpen. It was the final examination in a manner of speaking. The question asked? ‘Why should I hire you?’” Courtney told us, “I love cursive and have even created my own font! But when I was taking the SATs in high school, there’s a sentence you have to write in cursive that verifies that you’re the person taking the SAT and more than half the people in the room didn’t know how to write it. Crazy!”

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Today’s email was written by Whet Moser, edited by Annaliese Griffin, and produced by Luiz Romero.