PLATO LEARNING PHONE
Hands-on review by an 8th grader
Reviewed by VALENCY HARMSWhen Atari's long-awaited Learning Phone cartridge for the Plato
online service finally arrived at Antic, the editors decided they
wanted a student user to write this review. Luckily for me, my name popped
up and I got to use Plato for quite a few hours.
I'm fairly typical of the potential Learning Phone user.
I'm in the 8th grade, not a hacker but a frequent computer user (especially
all the new games) and with pretty good grades. And as a female, I break
the males-only stereotype of many computer users.
Developed over many years by the Control Data Corporation,
Plato is the largest educational online service in the world. Over 200,000
hours of courseware covers topics such as languages, mathematics, computer
science, physics, social science, etc. The catalog lists several hundred
titles ranging from the elementary (Addition & Subtraction) to way
beyond me (Numerical Quadrature Methods).
(Plato Rising, by David and Sandy Small in the July,
1984 issue of Antic, provides nearly seven pages of detail about
Plato's structure, contents, technology and history -ANTIC ED)
The Atari is one of the very few personal computers that
can connect with Plato. You need any 8-bit Atari computer and any Atari-compatible
modem (300 or 1200 baud)-along with the Learning Phone cartridge that makes
the Atari work like a Plato terminal. A printer is handy for printing out
instructions.
And you'll need a major credit card in order to take advantage
of the free 1-year subscription and 1-hour connect time ($32.50 value)
that comes with the package.
Of course you also need a telephone to connect to all
those programs on CDC's big computers in Minneapolis. In our family that
was a problem. Imagine me telling my three sisters that they couldn't use
the phone for a few hours because I was Platoing! If someone picks up the
phone, you'll be disconnected. If you have call waiting, notify the phone
company to disconnect it or suffer disconnects every time someone calls
you.
Educational programs always seem expensive. Purchased
programs cost $20-40 each. Plato costs $25 per year plus a user cost of
$7.75 for each hour online. In my area, the phone call to the Plato access
number costs an additional $6 per hour. That comes to $13.75 per hour-more
than enough to quickly break my babysitting income!
Unfortunately, Plato isn't available until after 6 pm
on weekdays. That means that I can't use it in my study time right after
school. But it can be used just about all day on weekends and holidays.
I found that connecting the modem was simple and fully
explained in the manual. Logging on was also easy to do and to remember-the
manual was excellent on this topic.
Selecting programs was also fully explained in the manual,
complete with pictures. The simple main menu included Plato Programs, Electronic
Mail, Graphics Design, User Information, Text Processing, File Management,
Reference Aids, and Other Features. Whew! Simple commands let me explore
many sub-choices easily. (I was disappointed to find that the "terminal
tickler"-an online joke- wouldn't work for me.)
Although it was easy to select a program, I found that
some of the titles were misleading. For instance, I chose That's Entertainment
and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a screen talking about
Foreign Military Sales! And I hadn't even called the Pentagon!
Once into the programs, I found that some were more difficult
than others. When I tried Factoring Quadratic Polynominals, I first tried
to read the introduction. Unfortunately, it had yet to be written. At least,
it was simple to back out-just press [SHIFT] [START] [S]. This set of keys
was often used when I got bored with a program, or found out that the program
I had selected was wrong for me.
I also used the Graphing Linear Equations set of programs.
I liked them but found that using the same formula over and over was quite
boring. I tried an English lesson on semicolons; it was very educational.
Lots of the writing was script-fancy but illegible on our monitor. All
in all, this was a good lesson with good content, but it got boring after
a while.
On the 300 baud modem Antic loaned us, Plato's
slowness made some programs boring. Letters echoed to the screen even slower
than I type-and that's slooow! (Dad says Plato is as fast as most terminal
programs, but that I had been spoiled by Atari's fast responses.) Plato's
special graphic characters were painfully slow.
I tried a text file named Computer Notes and read on and
on about Plato's disk file organization. Maybe it was useful for some but
it was based on CDC's weird 6-bit bytes rather than the 8-bit bytes used
in the rest of the world.
One of the harder problems I had to surmount was translating
Plato's special command keys like [LAB] and [DATA] into Atari keystrokes.
Most were simple, such as [START] [L] for [LAB]. Some were more difficult-
[MICRO] was the Atari inverse video key, for instance. Then I had to remember
to use [SHIFT] with some of the commands, and special character keys for
mathematical and geometric commands. Looking up these keys in the manual
took lots of time. Perhaps putting little labels on the keyboard would
have helped.
The Plato games were mostly fun, once I got used to no
color, no sound, no animation and only primitive graphics. The unique and
most enjoyable part of the games was playing with other players. All players
could see the same screens and talk to one another, yet take independent
action. I had a problem learning the more difficult games (Mona and Empire)
and found it impossible, at first, to talk and play. David Lepage of the
Izbug users group tried to teach me Empire but I couldn't figure out how
to talk back. Thanks anyway, David! Later, I read and practiced more and
found the multiple player teams most fun-we had players from around the
entire country.
There is much more to Plato than I have space or energy
to describe. I didn't try all the programs (no one could!) or the electronic
mail, text processing, graphics design and file management. Special features
such as zooming in on a part of the screen seemed like fun too. Despite
the drawbacks for the beginner, I found Plato a good learning source for
kids and adults alike. I am sure that it would improve my grades. Since
I was only testing Plato, I have to give it back. But my birthday is coming
up really soon.
LEARNING PHONE
Atari Corp.
1196 Borregas Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
(408) 745-2000
$24.95, 16K cartridge
With this professional writing debut of Valency Harms, the Harms
clan from Danville, CA becomes the first family to have three members published
in Antic.