[jcrash]

I was going to share this story but you beat me to it. They're still claiming this in tours ~2017.

The building was called the Foreign Languages Building until very recently and is now called the Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics Building.

Relevant info from the UIHistory site:

"Located on the site of the former Old Entomology Building, ground was broken on the Foreign Language Building (FLB) on December 18, 1968.

A popular myth is that the building's distinctive architecture was a result of its being designed to house a supercomputer on campus called Plato. The building was supposedly designed so that if it was bombed, the building's shell would fall outwards, protecting the supercomputer on the inside. It is also rumored that the building's interior layout was a result of trying to confuse Soviet spies and prevent them from stealing secrets from the supercomputer.

In reality, the building's architecture is not actually all that unique and was a popular style of the day. In fact, just a few blocks to the west, one may find the Speech and Hearing Sciences Building, which a 2-story clone of the building. Plato itself was real, but refered not to a secret government program, but rather to the first "modern" electronic learning system, the forbearer of course software like WebCT and Mallard. The mainframe computer that ran the Plato system was located in north campus, in a building which used to reside on the west side of the Bardeen Quad." [0]

[0] https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam...

Hilarious that the myth extends to the interior design - the basement really is a maze the first few times you visit.

[ot1138]

Plato was in fact real... I used it many times! Looking back, it was pretty impressive technology for its day but was quickly becoming obsolete. I hated having to walk all the way to campus to get some physics units in that I missed.

I vaguely seemed to recall that sometime around the Gulf war, I was able to modem in and connect remotely. Shortly after, I stopped getting Plato assignments!

[marshray]

My parents worked at UIUC in the early 1970's.

Plato was an early interactive learning system, the supercomputer was called the Illiac-IV.

The building was called the "Center for Advanced Computation". I don't know if the computer was in that building, but I don't think they were exactly hiding it from the Soviets.