… There was a feeling of believing in what you do and knowing it will make a difference that’s addictive.” Working at PLATO, she said, “changed almost everybody in really profound and important ways. Gunsalus herself was one of PLATO’s happy children of the future, going to work for Bitzer while a student at University Laboratory High School (“Uni”) and staying on for more than a decade. Gunsalus ’78 LAS, JD ’84 LAW, a UI administrator who helped organize the event. Microsoft was among the sponsors of the two-day showcase of hardware and memories, to which “there was an outpouring of response,” according to C.K.
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Ozzie’s own work with PLATO would evolve into Lotus Notes, software that won him status as a major player in the industry. “So many people flunked out of school because of passion about what we were doing,” Ozzie told the capacity crowd of PLATO alumni and executives and researchers from the surrounding computer industry of Silicon Valley. Now chief software architect for Microsoft, Ozzie reminisced to conference-goers about the “friendly orange glow” that drew him as a UI undergraduate into the incredible 24/7 computing world of the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL), where PLATO was housed. Johnson was on hand for a conference celebrating the system’s golden anniversary, held in early June at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. He described its educational paradigm as one “far beyond even what we do today.” ROGER JOHNSON ’65 ENG, MS ’66 ENG, PHD ’70 ENG, a computer entrepreneur (and a current member of the board of directors of the UI Alumni Association) was a graduate student in the days when PLATO was first evolving. “We had a lot of young people who didn’t know that there was an answer like ‘you can’t do it.’”īegun in 1960, more or less at the moment Bitzer hooked a television tube to the Illiac I mainframe on the Urbana campus to see if he could create a computer setup for individualized learning, PLATO stood for “Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations,” an acronym deliberately cultivated to evoke the Greek philosopher and his dialogues.
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“And we had a laboratory of people that knew how to do creative things. “Technology was just on the edge of being able to do some of these things if we used it creatively,” Bitzer recalled of that time. In this endeavor, they prefigured the shape of things to come with touch screens, plasma displays, online chat rooms, multiplayer gaming, cable modems, smart phone lines, instant messaging, blogging and e-newsletters. Inspired by enormous technical challenges to wild feats of ingenuity, PLATO’s mutable crew of young investigators devised innovations that made possible interactive lessons in which UI students not only learned material but engaged with it and were graded, all on computer. Under the guidance of professors Dan Alpert ’63 and Don Bitzer ’55 ENG, MS ’56 ENG, PHD ’60 ENG, gifted students – many still in high school – pioneered a new way to interact by computer, in an era when data was stored on paper tape and memory cost $2 per bit.
Such were the days of PLATO, a networked teaching system launched at the University of Illinois in the ’60s and celebrated at a recent conference in California. They left as virtuosos, versed in a computer environment decades ahead of its time.
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