The Military Origins of Social Computing: The Legacy of PLATO

I tend to focus on the origin of the computer within the military. Particularly in the early days of digital computing, the military was a key customer, and fundamental concepts of modern computing arose in universities and laboratories serving military contracts. Of course, the war would not last forever, and computing had applications in so many other fields—fields that, nonetheless, started out as beneficiaries of military largesse.

Consider education. The Second World War had a profound impact on higher education in the US. The GI bill made college newly affordable to veterans, who in the 1950s made up a large portion of the population. That was only the tip of the iceberg, though: military planners perceived the allied victory as a result of technical and industrial excellence. Many of the most decisive innovations of the war—radar and radionavigation, scientific management and operations research, nuclear weapons—had originated in academic research laboratories at the nation's most prestigious universities. Many of those universities, MIT, Stanford, University of California, created subsidiaries and spinoffs that act as major defense contractors to this day.

Educational institutions bent themselves, to some degree, to the needs of the military. The relationship was not at all one-sided. Besides direct funding for defense-oriented research, in the runup to the Cold War the military started to shower money on education itself. Research contracts from uniformed services and grant programs from the young DoD supported all kinds of educational programs. For the military, there were two general goals: first, it was assumed that R&D in civilian education would lead to findings that directly improved the military's own educational system. Weapons and tactics of war were increasingly technical, even computer controlled, and the military was acutely aware that training a large number of 18-year-old enlistees to operate complex equipment according to tactical doctrine under pressure was, well, to call it a challenge would be an understatement.

Second, the nation's ranks of academics made up something like a military auxiliary. The Civil Air Patrol built up a base of trained pilots, in case there was ever a need to quickly expand the Air Force. By the same logic, university programs in management, sciences, and education itself produced a corps of well-educated people who would form the staff of the next era of secret military laboratories. Well, that's not exactly how it turned out, with the Cold War's radical turn to privatization, but it was an idea, anyway.

That spirit of military-academic collaboration is how a group of researchers, mostly physicists, at the University of Illinois found themselves with military funding to develop a system called "Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations," or PLATO. With its origins in the late 1950s, and heyday in the 1970s, PLATO is usually considered the first effort in computerized teaching. It's a fascinating sibling to other large-scale computer systems of the time, like those in air traffic control. There are many similarities: PLATO struggled with connecting terminals and computers over a large area, before "the Internet" was even an idea. It had to display graphics, a very primitive computer capability at the time but one that was thought to be vital for classroom demonstrations. The system supported many simultaneous users, and had to process data in real-time to synchronize their various workspaces.

There were also important differences. Unlike SAGE and the 9020, unlike business accounting and tabulation systems, unlike almost every computer application yet devised, PLATO was designed for user-facilitated content.

Reflecting its origins among academic physicists, PLATO heavily emphasized collaboration. Many of the earlier, 1960s-era PLATO developments focused on simplifying the development of learning modules so that teachers could create interactive PLATO courses with less specialized computer training. By the 1970s, as PLATO terminals were increasingly installed in schools and other institutions in Illinois, the emphasis on collaboration turned towards communication. If learning modules were easy for teachers to develop, the students should also be able to use the system to create their own coursework and study materials. Researchers and other academic users had a similar desire for a computer system where they could keep notes, write reports, and stay in touch with their colleagues.

PLATO did not prove an enduring success—despite a decades-long effort toward commercialization, it was expensive and the actual benefits of computer-aided teaching remained unproven. Few PLATO systems ever escaped the University of Illinois and its network of satellite delivery locations. Follow-on projects fizzled out and, despite PLATO's incredible ascent from a 1960 concept to an elaborate 1970s multi-user interactive system, PLATO spent the 1980s in decline. No one thinks about PLATO very much any more, which is unfortunate, because it is one of those remarkable, isolated moments in history, a sort of conceptual singularity, in which a project with limited real success incubates so many concepts that it sets the course of history afterwards.

When you look at our modern computers, smartphones and social media and Farmville and so on, it's hard to find a single thing that isn't somehow derived from PLATO. Through PLATO's 1970s NSF funding and resulting interaction with other NSF efforts, it is my opinion that PLATO is probably a more important precursor to the modern internet than ARPANET and NSFNET. Not so much in a technical way; PLATO was closely tied to a mainframe-terminal architecture that would not have likely lead to our flexible packet-routing internet architecture. Rather, in a vibes way. PLATO was a large-area, networked computer system that emphasized posting things and looking at things other people had posted. It offered math lessons, but it also offered games.

Perhaps most importantly, it had notes.

PLATO's developers at the Computer-Based Education Research Lab of the University of Illinois had long had a simple way of communicating with each other, by editing a series of lessons titled "notes1" through "notes19." While functional, it was imperfect: Google Wave had not yet appeared to tell us that everyone being able to edit everything is good actually, so the complete lack of access controls, or formatting, or really organization of any kind was making the "notes" lessons a headache as the system gained users. In 1972, the PLATO IV terminal, new funding, and new backend computers had PLATO growing fast. There was an obvious need for a better version of the notes lessons.

Through the machinations of academia, the task of building a better "notes" file fell on two high-school students, on their summer break from the University of Illinois-affiliated laboratory high school. Using PLATO's native TUTOR programming language and facilities intended for exams and course discussions, Dave Woolley and Kim Mast wrote a lesson called "=notes=". The =notes= lesson was originally intended for system announcements, trouble reports, and communications between PLATO's operators. Soon, though, it was doing far more.

PLATO's notes were not the first implementation of a computer-based discussion board. Similar capabilities had been implemented by ARPANET users at least a couple of years earlier. It was also not the first email system, and indeed, was not email at all: notes only offered public posts. PLATO didn't gain a private messaging capability at all until a year later. The notes lesson wasn't even the only message board on PLATO, although it was the most sophisticated.

What stood out about notes is that it was popular. Everyone used it. By 1976, the notes lesson had evolved into a generalized application that allowed any PLATO user to create and manage their own notes file.