Growing up in Urbana, Illinois in the 1980's, I was fortunate that my school district was privy to the PLATO Learning System, created and managed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a child, I was able to access PLATO, an innovative system that pioneered the first online community and e-learning systems. The plasma touchscreen was a true precursor of today's tablet computers, and the system provided messaging and chat rooms before anyone had a computer at home, much less an internet connection.
While PLATO would be considered slow and clunky by today's standards, it did inspire many of my peers to study computer science at the University of Illinois, and to pursue high level careers in Silicon Valley (some didn't even bother to graduate, but went straight into an $80k salaried job during the Dot -com Bubble).
In 2010, the Computer History Museum hosted a conference to celebrate PLATO's 50th anniversary, complete with restored PLATO terminals for attendees. A compilation of videos from the PLATO@50 conference highlights PLATO's innovations and impact on computing history. The technology that provided PLATO's online education, course-ware, and community is the antecedent of the education technology that is now being applied in cutting edge cloud-based social-collaborative learning systems.
I was surprised to discover that PLATO continues to deliver courses in through the guise of the PLATO Learning company, though it lacks the multiplayer gaming and online communities that made the original PLATO system so engaging. For those of us who appreciate classical technology, and want to revisit the courses, games, and communities of our youth, there is a PLATO emulator, graciously hosted by like-minded conservationists, that can give us a flashback to the early days of educational computing.
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