PLATO (computer System) - Later Efforts and Other Versions

Later Efforts and Other Versions

One of CDC's greatest commercial successes with PLATO was an online testing system developed for NASD (now FINRA), a private-sector regulator of the US securities markets. During the 1970s Michael Stein, E. Clarke Porter and PLATO veteran Jim Ghesquiere, in cooperation with NASD executive Frank McAuliffe, developed the first "on-demand" proctored commercial testing service. The testing business grew slowly and was ultimately spun off from CDC as Drake Training and Technologies in 1990. Applying many of the PLATO concepts used in the late 1970s, E. Clarke Porter led the Drake Training and Technologies testing business (today Thomson Prometric) in partnership with Novell, Inc. away from the mainframe model to a LAN-based client server architecture and changed the business model to deploy proctored testing at thousands of independent training organizations on a global scale. With the advent of a pervasive global network of testing centers and IT certification programs sponsored by, among others, Novell and Microsoft, the online testing business exploded. Pearson VUE, was founded by PLATO/Prometric veterans E. Clarke Porter, Steve Nordberg and Kirk Lundeen in 1994 to further expand the global testing infrastructure. VUE improved on the business model by being one of the first commercial companies to rely on the Internet as a critical business service and by developing self-service test registration. The computer-based testing industry has continued to grow, adding professional licensure and educational testing as important business segments.

A number of smaller testing-related companies also evolved from the PLATO system. One of the few survivors of that group is The Examiner Corporation. Dr. Stanley Trollip (formerly of the University of Illinois Aviation Research Lab) and Gary Brown (formerly of Control Data) developed the prototype of The Examiner System in 1984.

In the early 1970s, James Schuyler developed a system at Northwestern University called HYPERTUTOR as part of Northwestern's MULTI-TUTOR computer assisted instruction system. This ran on several CDC mainframes at various sites.

Between 1973 and 1980, a group under the direction of Thomas T. Chen at the Medical Computing Laboratory of the School of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign ported PLATO's TUTOR programming language to the Modcomp IV minicomputer. Douglas W. Jones, A.B. Baskin, Tom Szolyga, Vincent Wu and Lou Bloomfield did most of the implementation. This was the first port of TUTOR to a minicomputer and was largely operational by 1976 In 1980, Chen founded Global Information Systems Technology of Champaign, Illinois, to market this as the Simpler system. GIST eventually merged with the Government Group of Adayana Inc. Vincent Wu went on to develop the Atari PLATO cartridge.

CDC eventually sold the "PLATO" trademark and some courseware marketing segment rights to the newly-formed The Roach Organization (TRO) in 1989. In 2000 TRO changed their name to PLATO Learning and continue to sell and service PLATO courseware running on PCs.

CDC continued development of the basic system under the name CYBIS (CYber-Based Instructional System) after selling the trademarks to Roach, in order to service their commercial and government customers. CDC later sold off their CYBIS business to University Online, which was a descendant of IMSATT. University Online was later renamed to VCampus.

The University of Illinois also continued development of PLATO, eventually setting up a commercial on-line service called NovaNET in partnership with University Communications, Inc. CERL was closed in 1994, with the maintenance of the PLATO code passing to UCI. UCI was later renamed NovaNET Learning, which was bought by National Computer Systems (NCS). Shortly after that, NCS was bought by Pearson, and after several name changes now operates as Pearson Digital Learning.