An earlier version of this article appeared in the January 1994
issue of Matrix News. PLATO originated in the early 1960's at
the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. Professor Don
Bitzer became interested in using computers for teaching, and
with some colleagues founded the Computer-based Education
Research Laboratory (CERL). Bitzer, an electrical engineer,
collaborated with a few other engineers to design the PLATO
hardware. To write the software, he collected a staff of
creative eccentrics ranging from university professors to high
school students, few of whom had any computer background.
Together they built a system that was at least a decade ahead of
its time in many ways. PLATO is a timesharing system. (It was,
in fact, one of the first timesharing systems to be operated in
public.) Both courseware authors and their students use the same
high-resolution graphics display terminals, which are connected
to a central mainframe. A special-purpose programming language
called TUTOR is used to write edu