Conference | DOI: 10.1145/1787234.1787261
Kirk L. Kroeker
celebrating the
Legacy of PLaTo
The PLATO@ 50 Conference marked the semicentennial
of the computer system that was the forerunner of today’s
social media and interactive education.

In eARLy June, the Computer His- tory Museum hosted the PLA- TO@ 50 Conference to mark the 50-year anniversary of the computer system that many credit with presaging the networked world of social media and interactive education that has become a mainstay of contemporary culture. More than 400 computing enthusiasts attended the event, the highlight of which was a moderated discussion between Don Bitzer, the inventor of PLATO, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect.

The event included several presentations and a reunion of PLATO alumni from across the U.S. As a special part of the conference, functioning PLATO terminals were set up in an interactive “PLATO playground” for use by conference participants. The terminals included many of the original PLATO games, such as Avatar and Empire, and an array of social media content preserved from the original PLATO databases.

PHotoGraPH Courtesy oF CarIna s Weet, CoMPuter HIstory MuseuM

“PLATO@ 50 was an important event for the museum to convene,” says John Hollar, president of the Mountain View, CA-based museum. “It traced the history of a system that produced the forerunners to an amazing array of technologies—hardware, software, and applications—that live on today, either in original or derivative form.” The conference, says Hollar, highlighted how PLATO in the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign produced an accomplished group of alumni, including Ray Ozzie, whose initial design for Lotus Notes derived from PLATO Notes, and Marc Andreessen, the co-author of Mosaic and founder of Netscape.

functioning PLa To terminals were set up for use by PLa To@ 50 conference participants. The terminals included many of the first PLa To games and an array of social media preserved from the original PLa To databases.

In addition to keynote speeches and
moderated discussions, PLATO@ 50
documented an array of events that
occurred at CERL from its inception in
1967 to its closing in 1994. “That story
is important to tell,” says Hollar. “The
conference paid tribute to a culture of
innovation and openness fostered by
Don Bitzer that clearly had an impact
on a large number of engineering and
computer science majors who passed
through CERL and the University of