June 10, 2026
Classroom hype, now with extra drama
Computer Lessons
How school computers went from miracle cure to ‘expensive page-turner’ chaos
TLDR: The article shows that schools were promised a computer-powered learning revolution as far back as the 1960s, with big projects like PLATO selling personalized teaching by machine. Commenters are split between admiration for the vision and cynical laughter that education tech has been repeating the same grand promises for decades.
The big mood in the community? We’ve seen this movie before. The article dives into the early dream that computers would transform classrooms, long before laptops and tablets were everywhere. Back in the 1960s, big government money, Cold War panic after Sputnik, and shiny new shared computer systems convinced educators they’d found the future. Systems like PLATO and Dartmouth’s time-sharing project promised something almost magical: a machine that could teach every student at their own pace, like a private tutor for all.
But the comments are where the sparks really fly. One camp is swooning over the ambition, calling it a fascinating lost future where schools genuinely tried to build tools for learning instead of just digitizing worksheets. The other camp is absolutely roasting the hype, pointing out that every generation seems to rediscover the same pitch: this new machine will fix education. The nastiest line of attack? That many of these systems were basically overfunded automation fantasies dressed up as progress. Critics gleefully latched onto the article’s killer quote that old teaching machines were little more than “expensive page turners,” with commenters joking that this also describes half of modern education software.
And yes, the humor got sharp. People mocked the flood of consultants, surveys, and buzzwords like it was the 1980s version of today’s ed-tech circus. The running joke: the hardware changed, but the sales pitch never did.
Key Points
- •The article says enthusiasm for computers as tools to transform education was established in American universities during the 1960s, before the microcomputer era.
- •Federal education and research funding expanded after Sputnik and through Great Society programs, helping support educational computing projects.
- •DTSS at Dartmouth College and PLATO at the University of Illinois were early time-sharing systems developed specifically for educational use and funded by government grants.
- •PLATO grew out of the earlier teaching-machine tradition associated with Sidney Pressey and B.F. Skinner.
- •According to the article, PLATO evolved from a simple slide-based system into a platform with graphical terminals, non-linear instruction, and interactive simulations such as a chemistry lab.