Wednesday, June 2- Program Details
Was it possible to teach with a computer? The fertile minds at the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign thought so. It was a heretical notion in 1959. CSL was proposing to use what was once the world's most powerful computer, the ILLIAC I mainframe, for teaching students. Madness!
The project demanded a paradigm shift. Computers crunched numbers. An educational system required real-time interaction with thousands of users in human terms: words, pictures and concepts. The hardware and software required didn't exist. So the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) team invented it.
Innovations included a new built-in memory graphical display - the flat-panel plasma screen. The one-inch square prototype debuted in 1967 is the grandfather of today's huge TV screens. Over time, PLATO also generated now-familiar on-line concepts and tools: forums, message boards, on-line testing, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing and interactive multi-player games. By June 1960, the first PLATO terminal, built from a used television set with a home-made keyset -- remember, there was no such thing in those days -- was running on the ILLIAC I mainframe. Thirty years later, students all over the globe were proving that computers could teach - effectively and affordably.
PLATO is 50 years old. But the project isn't just history. Today, the PLATO-based education system offers 10,000 hours of lesson material available to 100,000 students; the talented minds who helped develop PLATO are still applying what they learned to new technologies; and the PLATO architecture has much in common with what is now known, decades later, as "Cloud Computing".
In celebration of PLATO's 50th Anniversary, The Computer History Museum is proud to host a wide-ranging discussion with Don Bitzer, the "father of PLATO," and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, who worked on PLATO while a student at the University of Illinois in the '70s. The discussion will be moderated by The New York Times technology writer John Markoff.
Bitzer's work on computational signal processing prepared him to design large educational systems such as PLATO. It also spawned smart modems for telephone and cable systems. Bitzer won an Emmy for scientific achievement in 2002 in honor of his role in the invention of the flat panel screen. That award symbolizes what Bitzer called "completely unanticipated and unplanned consequences of the PLATO project."
No less than Bill Gates called Ray Ozzie "one of the five best programmers in the universe." Ozzie credits his early work on PLATO with inspiring Lotus Notes, the first commercially successful groupware product. Notes brought PLATO-like group collaboration into the office. Ozzie has said he's spent the majority of his career trying to reinvent the user experience of PLATO.
Bitzer and Ozzie's thoughts on problem-solving, cognitive science, innovation and inspiring unbridled creativity are relevant to anyone interested in how "new" happens.
