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Paul Tenczar Develops The TUTOR Programming Language for Education and Games

1967 to 1969
Paul Tenczar, circa 1973.  From Brian Dear, "PLATO Notes released 40 years ago today," medium.com, August 7, 2013.

Paul Tenczar, circa 1973.  From Brian Dear, "PLATO Notes released 40 years ago today," medium.com, August 7, 2013.

In 1967 Paul Tenczar developed the TUTOR programming language for use in developing electronic learning programs called "lessons" for the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It has "powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics and features to stimulate handling student records and statistics by instructors."  (Wikipedia article on TUTOR, accessed 9-2021). This also made it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons— that is, games—including flight simulators, war games, role-playing, such as Dungeons and Dragons (dnd), card games, word games, and Medical lesson games.

Among the early documentation of the TUTOR language, under Tenczar's name, is The TUTOR Manual, CERL Report X-4, by R. A. Avner and P. Tenczar, January 1969.

See Brian Dear, The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture (2017).

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