PLATO: An educational computer system from the '60s shaped the future (2023) | Hacker News Reader

PLATO: An educational computer system from the '60s shaped the future (2023)

arstechnica.com

102 pointsrbanffy28 comments

"The Friendly Orange Glow" is a wonderful book about the development, implementation, and ultimate downfall of the Plato system. Well worth the read!

Love this book. I did a short interview with the author Brian Dear about his writing tools + process a while back. Perhaps my favorite anecdote is that he started working on this book in 1985, using MSDOS and later a NeXT cube for his notes. The authorial process truly experienced the full gamut of personal storage mediums over the years.

https://writeswith.com/interviews/brian-dear/

I discovered (and thoroughly enjoyed reading) the book thanks to that interview!

Thank You So Much :)

It's fantastic - I read very little book length non-fiction (because I largely read books in bed to relax, 10k+ word essays or entire documentation sites are a different matter), but it was gripping, thoughtful, beautiful, and so, so much worth it.

It made enough of an impression on a subset of the users that I believe the free-to-access cyber1 system is still going and has (just) enough people on it to retain some of the social aspects.

I also liked TFOG. I wish PLATO were more widely available (especially with all of the software for education, science, communication, and [importantly!] games) for examination, emulation, experimentation, and general use.

I remember Plato as a kid in the 80s. My mom wrote software for the at the University of Delaware. I remember using the touch screens. there was this game where you could drop a flowerpot on Mickey Mouse, and a game where you'd brew a potion and it would randomly generate a vector drawing of a monster.

It's cool to see this as one of the top comments. I grew up in southern Delaware, and remember messing around with Plato at Delaware Technical and Community College, which was also a satellite campus for UD, when I'd hang out there with an elementary school friend whose mom worked there. I feel grateful to have had exposure to things. I don't remember much about it, but I remember that it felt very futuristic and magical.

Posts like this make me very happy - I've never seen a real Plato terminal working and have little idea of the social context they'd be used.

I love to quote William Gibson on this: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“

You had a glimpse of it. Treasure those memories.

I loved Plato on my TI-99/4A computer when I was a kid. I credit it with helping me become a much better student. When my oldest son was struggling in grammar school, 15 years ago, I got it running on the Mame emulator for him, and it turned him and then his sibling into excellent students!

I don't understand why there isn't an even better version of this in the modern age. A complete curriculum K-12 that is self-driven in a similar manner. Mostly the same methodology of mostly reading and images with quizzes after sections. Then a total category exam. Maybe scatter in short effective videos, but it should not be video centered!

I was at UofD in the 70's as a student and then in the 80's as an employee of the Computing Center. It was pretty cool when Delaware got their own Plato system to run. As mentioned elsewhere recommend "The Friendly Orange Glow" for stories from that era in time.

I worked with Hank Hufnagel to clone Tutor onto the Burroughs system. He worked for months on getting the judging to work exactly like the original. After that it was pretty easy to spin up the rest of the language. With the exception of lessons that required external hardware, porting lessons was easy. The Burroughs mainframe supported running Tutor on the Magnavox Plato terminals and other CRTs (Dumb glass was text only)

One interesting thing was Hank took the judging software and used it to develop a AI like (for the late 70's / 80's) help system that did front line triage for terminal issues, common programming problems, etc.

Why is it that, sixty years after PLATO, we don't have automated teaching programs that really work? By now, the hardware is cheap, everything up to and including VR can be easily delivered, and machines can have semi-intelligent conversations.

Teaching requires more than semi-intelligence.

Also I wouldn’t trust the current crop of “AI” software to generate accurate VR images, say of the workings of a steam engine or mechanical clock.

The part that's hard to automate is where the student actually makes an effort.

Duolingo, probably the most widely used teaching program, is designed around motivating the user to come back every day to the point where learning takes a bit of a back seat, probably because a too-demanding curriculum would decrease engagement.

On the other end of the motivation spectrum, a textbook with exercises and solutions is a teaching technology that really works, with hardly more interactivity required than flipping to the back to check your solution. Of course nowadays you can also ask an LLM to critique your understanding and try to pinpoint exactly where you got something wrong.

The problem with Duolingo is that it doesn’t seem to work even when it perfectly triggers people to make multi-year streaks with its gamification.

Yes, that's why I brought it up. We have teaching technology that works (textbooks) if you're motivated enough to put in the effort required, but insofar as learning requires effort and effort is demotivating, most people will gravitate towards the solution that demands the least effort (and provides the least learning) without being obviously useless.

Decreasing the effort required to learn something is probably hard (though quality-of-life improvements like making information more readily available are certainly possible) and so is motivating people to exert more effort, but there might be some value in establishing exactly how much effort a specific student is willing to expend, and then providing them with the most useful exercises that don't exceed that level.

> Yes, that's why I brought it up. We have teaching technology that works (textbooks) if you're motivated enough to put in the effort required, but insofar as learning requires effort and effort is demotivating, most people will gravitate towards the solution that demands the least effort (and provides the least learning) without being obviously useless.

That’s wrong.

Duolingo sucks. So does the conventional textbook approach. People can go through years of the conventional textbook approach and learn nothing. I certainly did.

The litmus test for learning isn’t how much effort it requires and how much it demotivates you.

The school of thought where language input with sufficient comprehension is emphasized has already worked for all those people who learned English as an nth language by playing video games, watching movies and Netflix, and without grinding through books.

And compared to that? Duolingo looks much more like the conventional approach if you look past the insipid gamification and toddler-level "the boy drinks water and sits on an apple".

I don't mean that textbooks are all great, but that textbooks work as a technology, i.e. there are textbooks where if you work through them front to back and do all the exercises, you come away with a decent understanding of the topics the book was designed to cover. If you don't, that's less an indictment of their insufficient technological sophistication than an indication that the content wasn't good enough.

Actually, Duolingo as a technology isn't necessarily that bad either, it's just Duolingo-the-company with its business incentives that limit its potential.

And of course not everything that requires effort is necessarily a good way to learn, but I don't think there's any way to learn that's also effortless.

E.g. the least-effort way to play a video game in a foreign language is to figure out how to operate the interface through trial-and-error (or watching someone else play) and then rely on spatial memory to press the right buttons without having to read the labels. And people who watch foreign-language movies or shows typically do so with subtitles that free them from having to learn anything, so they might just pick up the names of characters and maybe a few common expressions.

The comprehensible input approach requires a lot of effort upfront to make the input comprehensible in the first place (even if it's toddler-level content, that still means it targets people with a vocabulary of several thousand words) and then you still need to push yourself a bit to actually learn something, rather than mentally skipping over the parts you didn't understand.

> Actually, Duolingo as a technology isn't necessarily that bad either, it's just Duolingo-the-company with its business incentives that limit its potential.

Clearly that’s not the case when multi-year streakers don’t have a clue what to do.

They followed the instructions of streaking and didn’t get anywhere. The ones I have seen anyway (YouTube).

> And of course not everything that requires effort is necessarily a good way to learn, but I don't think there's any way to learn that's also effortless.

No one said effortless. You can’t bolster your side by making up that someone marked a place on the complete opposite extreme of the spectrum.

> E.g. the least-effort way to play a video game in a foreign language is to figure out how to operate the interface through trial-and-error (or watching someone else play) and then rely on spatial memory to press the right buttons without having to read the labels. And people who watch foreign-language movies or shows typically do so with subtitles that free them from having to learn anything, so they might just pick up the names of characters and maybe a few common expressions.

I don’t know why you are setting up this armchair theory. I said what has worked for people. Not in theory. IN REALITY. People who have immersed enough time into English indirectly by playing video games, watching Netflix and whatnot. And also seeing no real correlation with their practical, day-to-day abilities and their formal studies of English that they have to go through in school.

You can see this every time someone goes from relatively passive learning through single-player video games to participating in voice chat in multi-player video games and discussing things in English online. Do you think they stop themselves half-way through this process and grind grammar/whatever other English books in order to work up to talking to people in real life?

> The comprehensible input approach requires a lot of effort upfront to make the input comprehensible in the first place (even if it's toddler-level content, that still means it targets people with a vocabulary of several thousand words) and then you still need to push yourself a bit to actually learn something, rather than mentally skipping over the parts you didn't understand.

What it requires is a lot of time and exposure. Where your “actually learn” weasel phrase fits in is unclear since all that seems required is sufficient interest in the associated topics (not the language per se).

Have you considered that it might be because computer-based education doesn't really work?

There's a long history of technology which promised to revolutionize education - records, radio, film reels, TV broadcasts, VCR, microcomputer software, the constructionist faith in "One Laptop Per Child", MOOCs, and more.

Add this to the pile.

There are always some students who can learn on their own, and who will, for example, learn Latin from a book at the age of 6.

Most kids are not thing way.

I think most kids need someone to be there for the long-term emotional connection. Ideally (in my view), someone who respects them, and encourages them to learn, which the student can reciprocate by success in class and personal growth.

Technology cannot make that connection.

PLATO based lessons seem to have helped as an augment to normal style education.

I don't think revolutionize is particularly on the horizon, but "doesn't really work" really depends on what you're defining your success condition to be.

Sure. Thing is, every one of those technologies I listed also "helped as an augment to normal style education."

Including a copy of a book like "Introduction to Latin".

I have to be hand-wavy because the full analysis has to include factors like the cost of licensing, the cost of hardware and maintenance, the time to integrate into the curriculum, how often the UI and content changes, and the loss of space for and access to other resources.

Like, our local elementary school got rid of its staff librarian to have money for more student electronics, and now they are talking about bringing a librarian back.

I've only ever seen PLATO-based systems used at the college level, which is where we also expect students to be more self-motivated. That would be another factor.

One person talking in front of thirty kids is not much of a connection.

It's still more than with a computer.

I don't think I had any teacher who only talked in front of us. Not only did that do more than that in class, and via marked papers, we also had teachers who helped out in school clubs, and attended bake sales, and set up the room for parent visits, and lead field trips, and organized sports days and fire drills. One teacher went the same church as my family, and I bumped into teachers a few times around town.

1 to 30 is higher than average for most of the US. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ntps/tables/ntps1718_fltable06_t... and https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ntps/estable/table/ntps/ntps2021... tell me it's more like 1:25.

I also find this an interesting thought. Maybe an inability to monetize ideas in the space?

I've read many many anecdotes over the years of Europeans learning or perfecting their English language skills playing classic point and click adventure games that were either unavailable localised or the localisation was bad. It feels like that's an interesting language learning entry point.

I also like the idea of an AI plugged into a glasses video camera just narrating what you're doing in your target language.

Donald Bitzer has died

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42406158

Thanks! Here's a list of related threads—if there are others, please let us know.

Donald Bitzer has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42406158 - Dec 2024 (22 comments)

How to make almost any computer a modern-day PLATO terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38024047 - Oct 2023 (4 comments)

PLATO: An educational computer system from the 60s shaped the future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208286 - March 2023 (89 comments)

Irata.online: A PLATO service for retro computing enthusiasts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32600338 - Aug 2022 (26 comments)

The PLATO Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782661 - Jan 2022 (1 comment)

Irata.online a modern implementation of the PLATO computing system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24207044 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)

John Hunter’s World Peace Game, Roger Ebert, and the PLATO System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460259 - June 2020 (9 comments)

A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615420 - March 2018 (45 comments)

When Star Trek’s Spock Met PLATO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16019201 - Dec 2017 (1 comment)

The Internet That Wasn’t: Review of “The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15784052 - Nov 2017 (24 comments)

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747924 - Nov 2017 (1 comment)

The Greatest Computer Network You’ve Never Heard of (PLATO) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703024 - Nov 2017 (3 comments)

Performing History on PLATO: A Response to a Recent SIGCIS Presentation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15542999 - Oct 2017 (1 comment)

Want to see gaming’s past and future? Dive into the “educational” world of PLATO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957552 - Nov 2016 (7 comments)

Ars Technica on the history of PLATO games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12827672 - Oct 2016 (1 comment)

PLATO (computer system) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6666430 - Nov 2013 (23 comments)

Threads like this is why I come to HN and why I contribute to it. We are a wonderful community.

This is what motivated me to bring back PLATO to the discussion. More people should know it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com