PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) originated in the early 60's at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. Professor Dan Bitzer, an electrical engineer, who founded the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL), collaborated with a few other engineers to design the PLATO hardware. Paul Tenczar developed a programming language called TUTOR to write educational software. It became a model for many authoring languages for tutorial CAI systems. Throughout the 60's, PLATO remained a small system, but in the mid 70's it expanded enormously. Better versions used high resolution graphic terminals. Now you can find about 400 terminals on the campus and more than 1300 terminals throughout the USA. More than 10,000 hours of computer based learning material is available. The cost of running the PLATO system was enormous, with one PLATO-mainframe costing $3,000,000 and the line rental coming to $2,500 per month [
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