Alan Anderson wrote:
> > Alan Anderson <Ala
...@pacbell.net> wrote:
> >>Over the years I marveled that CDC would come up with some great
> >>ideas and then have no follow through or follow up and let them
> >>die on the vine.
> > Eugene Miya wrote:
> > Some of the ideas might have truly been good, but it depends how you
> > viewed the early company verus the goals of the later company.
> > Most of the early great ideas involved great fast hardware, but over time,
> > other market forces, the idea that CDC could compete with or against IBM,
> > didn't work out favorably: there were more than just fast CPUs.
> I saw other ideas that had great potential but were dropped,
> flubbed or otherwise screwed up.
> One I was impressed with in a couple of areas was Plato learning
> system. I took several classes on Plato and found it to be the
> best computer aided learning system I have ever taken. To be able
> to take a pre-test and move forward if you passed it and do that
> until you reached the area where you needed to learn the chapter
> and then take the post-test to be able to move on. That was a
> great system. I watched one of my children take Plato remedial
> educational classes to help him catch up to his peers. He
> progressed so quickly that in about five weeks he acomplished
> about a year schooling.
Illinois where it was developed. Although I never had much direct
contact with it, I had plenty of indirect contact with it. The quality
of the courseware was more dependent on the skill of the programmer who
wrote it and the educator, if any, who designed it rather than on any
inherent feature of Plato.
It was a very strange project about which there were many rumors (most
of which I will not repeat [even though I enjoy them :-)] since many
were passed along by those with axes to grind and I can't verify them).
It was started in the early '60s by an EE grad student with a vision and
not much initial support from either the Computer Science or Education
Departments (that changed later as they discovered they could pry large
grants out of NSF by mentioning Plato).
The project went through several incarnations. I believe the version
sold to CDC was Plato IV. The original early-'60s design was influenced
to a large extent by what was possible with the hardware and technology
available at that time. As science and engineering progressed over the
next two decades, the relative costs of various engineering trade-offs
changed. Some things initially impossible or prohibitively expensive
became affordable; some initial cost-saving tradeoffs became
cost-enhancing tradeoffs.
Anyhow, it always seemed to have a life of its own. It remained
separate from the Computer Science Department -- though a lot of their
professors made good livings from grants for projects using Plato :-).
I got the impression practicality was never much of a concern. It never
seemed to meet its announced performance objectives.
I got the impression Plato had a lot of unearned support. That is, the
NSF, some influential and powerful administrators at the University of
Illinois, and Bill Norris all seemed so much in love with the idea of
Plato that they were all willing (enthusiastic, actually) to throw as
much money and other resources as possible at it. After CDC bought
Plato from the U of I (and possibly before then when CDC was funding
part of the development), there were rumors CDC lumped the project in
with other projects or with a large, existing department so that it
would not be possible for stockholders to find out how much it was
costing the company. There was a general impression that Plato was a
huge unprofitable financial drain on the company that was only tolerated
because it was one of Bill Norris's pet projects.
Plato was expensive for customers, too. It only ran on 6000-, 170-, and
70-series CYBERs (though I've heard of efforts to implement it on less-
expensive systems in the late '80s) and the courseware was written in
TUTOR -- a language used for nothing else (I actually have a book on it
somewhere that I plan to read some day :-)). The fancier features of
Plato required very expensive terminals/monitors; I believe those
features were subsequently dropped. I suspect the Plato features that
proved cost-effective enough to survive could be implemented on most
modern PCs.
For more information on the history of Plato, see
http://www.lightner.net/lightner/manitowish/plato.html . It was written
by a former professor of mine who worked much more closely with Plato
and was much more favorably disposed towards it than I. See also:
http://www.plato.com/
http://www.platopeople.com/
http://www.hoovers.com/plato-learning/--ID__15761--/free-co-factsheet...
http://www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm
http://www.pearsonedtech.com/novanet/
http://www.tencore.com/
Bob Lidral
l i d r a l at a l u m dot m i t dot e d u
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