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Plato pterm cyber15/31/2023 ![]() 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. Built on a CDC 1604, given to them by William Norris, PLATO III could simultaneously run up to 20 lessons, and was used by a local facilities in Champaign-Urbana that could enter the system with their custom terminals. It included a television set for display and a special keyboard for navigating the system's function menus PLATO II, in 1961, featured two users at once.Ĭonvinced of the value of the project, the PLATO system was re-designed, between 19 PLATO III allowed "anyone" to design new lesson modules using their TUTOR programming language, conceived in 1967 by biology graduate student Paul Tenczar. In 1960, the first system, PLATO I, operated on the local ILLIAC I computer. ![]() After weeks of meetings they were unable to suggest a single-design system, yet, before conceding failure, Alpert mentioned the matter to laboratory assistant Donald Bitzer, who had been thinking about the problem, suggesting he could build a demonstration system.īitzer, regarded as the Father of PLATO, recognized that in order to provide quality computer-based education, good graphics were critical (this at a time when 10 character per second teleprinters were the norm). GenesisĪround 1959 Chalmers Sherwin, a physicist at the University of Illinois, suggested a computerised learning system to William Everett, the engineering college dean, who, in turn, recommended that Daniel Alpert, another physicist, convene a meeting about the matter with engineers, administrators, mathematicians, and psychologists. Air Force's Office of Scientific Research had a conference about the topic of computer instruction at the University of Pennsylvania interested parties, notably IBM, presented studies. The U.S.S.R.'s 1957 launching of the Sputnik I artificial satellite energized the United States' government into spending more on science and engineering education. To wit, if computerised automation increased factory production, it could do the same for academic instruction. The trend towards greater enrollment notable by the early 1950s, and the problem of providing instruction for the many new students was a serious concern to university administrators. Bill that provided free college education to World War II veterans, higher education was limited to a minority of the U.S. CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the computer world the last production PLATO system was shut down in 2006 (coincidentally, just a month after Norris died), yet it established key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games.īefore the 1944 G.I. The PLATO project was assumed by the Control Data Corporation (CDC), who built the machines with which PLATO operated at the University. Several descendant systems still operate. Originally, PLATO was built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework (elementary–university) to UIUC students, local schools, and other universities. 1960, on ILLIAC I) generalized computer assisted instruction system, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. PLATO ( Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the first (ca. PLATO running a fractional distillation simulation.
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