PLATO (computer System) - NSF Involvement

NSF Involvement

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. Accordingly, in 1967 the National Science Foundation granted the team steady funding, allowing Bitzer to set up the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the university.

In 1972 a new system named PLATO IV was ready for operation. The PLATO IV terminal was a major innovation. It included Bitzer's orange plasma display invention which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The display was a 512x512 bitmap, with both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. Users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary bitmap graphics. Compressed air powered a piston-driven microfiche image selector that permitted colored images to be projected on the back of the screen under program control. The PLATO IV display also included a 16-by-16 grid infrared touch panel allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen.

It was also possible to connect the terminal to peripheral devices. One such peripheral was the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind (named after inventor Sherwin Gooch), a synthesizer that offered 4 voice music synthesis to provide sound in PLATO courseware. This was later supplanted on the PLATO V terminal by the Gooch Cybernetic Synthesizer, which had 16 voices that could be programmed individually or combined to make more complex sounds. This allowed for what today is known as multimedia experiences. A PLATO-compatible music language was developed for these synthesizers, as well as a compiler for the language, two music text editors, a filing system for music binaries, programs to play the music binaries in real time, and many debugging and compositional aids. A number of interactive compositional programs have also been written.

Another peripheral was the Votrax speech synthesizer, and a "say" instruction (with "saylang" instruction to choose the language) was added to the Tutor programming language to support text-to-speech synthesis using the Votrax.

The goal of this system was to provide tools for music educators to use in the development of instructional materials, which might possibly include music dictation drills, automatically graded keyboard performances, envelope and timbre ear-training, interactive examples or labs in musical acoustics, and composition and theory exercises with immediate feedback.

With the advent of microprocessor technology, new PLATO terminals were developed to be less expensive and more flexible than the PLATO IV terminals. At the University of Illinois, these were called PLATO V terminals, even though there never was a PLATO V system (the system continued to be called PLATO IV). The Intel 8080 microprocessors in these terminals made them capable of executing programs locally, much like today's Java applets and ActiveX controls, and allowed small software modules to be downloaded into the terminal to augment to the PLATO courseware with rich animation and other sophisticated capabilities that were not available otherwise using a traditional terminal-based approach.

Early in 1972, researchers from Xerox PARC were given a tour of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. At this time they were shown parts of the system such as the Show Display application generator for pictures on PLATO (later translated into a graphics-draw program on the Xerox Star workstation), and the Charset Editor for "painting" new characters (later translated into a "Doodle" program at PARC), and the Term Talk and Monitor Mode communications program. Many of the new technologies they saw were adopted and improved upon when these researchers returned to Palo Alto, California. They subsequently transferred improved versions of this technology to Apple Inc..

By 1975 the PLATO System served almost 150 locations from a donated CDC Cyber 73, including not only the users of the PLATO III system, but a number of grammar schools, high schools, colleges and universities, and military installations. PLATO IV offered text, graphics and animation as intrinsic components of courseware content, and included a shared-memory construct ("common" variables) that allowed TUTOR programs to send data between various users. This latter construct was used both for chat-type programs, as well as the first multi-user flight simulator.

With the introduction of PLATO IV, Bitzer declared general success, claiming that the goal of generalized computer instruction was now available to all. However the terminals were very expensive (about $12,000), so as a generalized system PLATO would likely need to be scaled down for cost reasons alone.