 |
|
 Home
Products
Store
Forum
Warehouse
Contact Us
|
|
|
|
 
|
|
Author
|
Topic: PLATO: Preserving an early online community
|
Steve Kraus
Film God
Posts: 4094
From: Chicago, IL, USA
Registered: May 2000
|
posted 11-12-2004 07:40 PM
Capsule: Using modern computers to emulate long gone large mainframes, a small group is preserving the history of PLATO, one of the very first (if not the first) online communities by setting up and running such a system using old software.
PLATO was a computer system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for educational purposes. Students actually took lessons on a variety of subjects at computer terminals scattered across the campus. This was before the internet and before microprocessors, PC's and Macs. All terminals controlled by a central computer. PLATO formed one of the first online communities and innovated features we now take for granted such as email, discussion forums, and live chat. Later commercialized, other systems were sold to other schools and institutions. It basically died in the face of PC's and the internet. A small group is now running a PLATO system (with permssion of the rights holders) and one can connect via the internet using a terminal simulator program which takes the place of the original custom-designed terminal.
---
Beginning in the 1960's the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign embarked on a project to make use of computers in education. The project was called PLATO. This was years before the invention of the microprocessor; PC's and Mac's were even farther off. And the predecessor to the internet, the ARPANET was just in its infancy. PLATO used large mainframe computers. The original experiments involved at first just a single terminal and then a pair in a time sharing arrangement. Along the way they developed a custom programming language called TUTOR especially designed for creating lessons and handling and judging student input. By the time they got to the next generation, called PLATO III, they set up a number of sites with video display terminals around the campus.
They had more ambitious plans, however. They knew an educational system should be able to show graphics not just text. Graphics terminals were very expensive at the time because computer memory was very expensive and a graphics terminal needs a lot to keep track of the status of each pixel (dot) on the screen. (By contrast an alphanumeric-only terminal only stores the character codes and continuously converts them into dot patterns as the video is cranked out over and over on the screen. The memory requirements are miniscule compared to a graphics terminal of good resolution.)
The solution was to invent the plasma display panel. That's right, the plasma display which is now becoming popular for large flat TV screens originated at the UIUC which holds some of the patents on it. For PLATO the early displays were monochromatic and didn't do gray scale. Their chief advantage was that they had inherent self-memory. Individual dots could be turned on or off and they would stay that way. No expensive memory needed. Because the panels employed neon gas that monochromatic color was a nice soothing orange! The PLATO IV terminal was famous for its orange display. PLATO's display was 512 x 512 which was very high resolution in its day. Owens-Illinois was licensed to build the plasma display panels and the UofI contracted with Magnavox to contruct terminals around them.
This is mid-1970's.
Among the features of the terminal besides the revolutionary plasma display panel were alternate character sets that could be loaded into the terminal from the mainframe, a custom keyboard with keys that fit the academic setting like LAB and DATA. On PLATO all keypresses are sent first to the mainframe before being sent back (echoing) for display. Thus, a programmer can make any key carry out any function. Many terminals were equipped with touch screens where students could point to locations at the screen and have the computer recognize this. (This was done with intersecting infrared beams just in front of the display.) Because the display was a clear glass plate there was a translucent screen placed behind it and on some terminals a microfiche projector in the top could project images onto it under computer control with the plasma display being used to point to and mark places in the images. The slide selector as it was called was powered by compressed air. Simple animation was possible by replotting custom characters.
The PLATO IV system was very successful and hundreds of terminals were installed around campus in over a dozen locations. Thousands of hours worth of TUTOR courseware was developed and the University's Computer-based Education Research Laboratory continued to make advancements in the system. Other schools across the country signed on and hooked up terminals to the CERL system via modem. At its peak over a thousand terminals were connected to the pair of Control Data mainframes running the system. At UIUC the physics, chemistry and foreign languages departments were major users but the subjects taught on the system ran the gamut. It wasnt at all unusual for 800 or more terminals to be active at once on the CERL system and pretty amazing when you think that every keypress has to receive the attention of the mainframe before it even appears on the screen. (Naturally later attempts to connect terminals via TCP/IP and the internet were not very successful due to the delays involved.)
PLATO was even demonstrated by one of the founders, Don Bitzer, on the Phil Donahue show. Don was one of the key inventors of the plasma display and received an Emmy for it last year.
Later the UIUC sold marketing rights to the system to Control Data which set up its own system and sold a number of the to schools around the country. Many of these were interconnected. CERL at UofI continued to develop system software and release it to the other systems.
One of the most interesting aspects looking back at PLATO is how it became one of the pioneering online communities and yet has received little attention outside those who actually used it. PLATO users may not have sent the very first electronic mail but they were certainly among the first large users of the medium. PLATO also had something they called "notefiles" which originated as online discussion forums for debugging software but quickly turned into individual forums covering almost any topic you can think of--a forerunner to the internet "usenet" newsgroup system. Long before bulletin board systems and the World Wide Web PLATO was offering live chat. Games were also a big part of PLATO for many users. Some of these were multiuser games like Dungeons and Dragons and Empire.
The PLATO IV terminal could also be connected to external equipment via a jack on the back. Among the gear developed to work with PLATO was a random access audio device using large LP-sized magnetic floppy disks which was used in language teaching. The device used a compressed air mechanism similar to the slide selector to select tracks. Voice and musical synthesizers were also created. Later terminals were microprocessor based but even the originals were pretty amazing. For example in drawing lines on the screen to form a graphic the mainframe only gave the terminal the endpoints, not all the dots to be turned on. These were calculated locally by the terminal but entirely by hardware, no microprocessor.
With the coming of PC's and the rise of the internet PLATO started to fall by the wayside. Control Data sold the name and some of the courseware to another company and then the PLATO system business (by now under another name) to another firm. The University privatized the CERL operation and gradually the systems contracted and went dark. It is believed the FAA still runs an original style mainframe PLATO system for training its employees.
There has been growing interest in preserving PLATO's role in our online heritage. One of the principles is currently working on a book about it: http://www.platopeople.com/
http://www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm ...contains a good history of the innovations of PLATO.
More recently a group of private individuals has decided to resurrect an actual working PLATO system. I'm not sure of the exact hardware involved but it involves a software emulator to take the place of the old big iron. The emulator then runs the original Control Data NOS operating system and the PLATO code runs on top of this. A terminal emulator enables connection across the internet (with a certain amount of lag of course). Information about the "Cyber1" PLATO system...oops...they have to call it "CYBIS" because of the naming issue...may be found here: http://www.cyber1.org/
Access is freely given upon request although I'm not sure how much would make sense to those unfamiliar with it. Do note that owing to the academic purpose of the system programs...even non educational ones...are always called "lessons."
My own collection of PLATO pictures:
http://plato.filmteknik.com
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
All times are Central (GMT -6:00)
|
|
Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classicTM
6.3.1.2
The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion
and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.
|
|
|
|
Printer-friendly view of this topic