The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Stolurow decided to build his own system. He named it SOCRATES, which stood for “System for Organizing Content to Review and Teach Educational Subjects.” A more blunt statement about PLATO is hard to imagine: in ancient Greece, Socrates was Plato’s teacher. “I used the resources I had in my own laboratory and developed SOCRATES as a result of the frustrations I had with PLATO,” Stolurow says. SOCRATES would run on the filmstrip-based AutoTutor device created by programmed-instruction proponent Norm Crowder, but would be connected to an IBM 1620 computer—the same type that Bitzer helped install at IIT in India—to capture data from the student as well as to determine the sequencing of individual filmstrip frames. AutoTutors were flimsy, “jury-rigged terminals,” admits Stolurow, resembling a microfiche machine one sees in libraries. At the project’s peak there were only about a dozen terminals in use, each equipped with a primitive “keyboard” that only had about fifteen keys on it.

  As a student progressed through a SOCRATES lesson, the AutoTutor would jump forward or backward to the appropriate film frame and display it on the built-in rear-projection screen. One could not help but recall Thorndike’s 1912 vision regarding an automated textbook, or Crowder’s own scrambled textbooks from the late 1950s. (PLATO I or II inherited a bit of the Thorndike and Crowder visions as well: if there was one thing many people agreed on in the early 1960s, it was to use the branching style of “programmed instruction” that Crowder had promulgated as a starting point.) Unlike in a scrambled textbook, all of the AutoTutor’s content was recorded on a filmstrip, and the contraption could randomly select any frame of film after noisily zooming ahead or back.

  SOCRATES classroom, 1964 Credit 18

  The SOCRATES project attracted some government funding, enabling Stolurow to create a Training Research Laboratory and hire some technical people to set up the system, including programming. Among those people were Rick Blomme, who had acted out the role of student at the Allerton House PLATO demonstration in 1961, along with Scott Krueger and Jan Schultz. Together they made SOCRATES work as best they could. “PLATO had so much more going for it in terms of its core technology,” says Schultz, who found the 35mm-filmstrip approach cumbersome at times.

  A professor of educational psychology, Richard C. Anderson, took a job at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1963, and when he saw PLATO and SOCRATES, at first he found SOCRATES more appealing. But those jury-rigged AutoTutor terminals gave him pause. “It was a technologically impossible system,” he says, “trying to run spools of film backward and forward with a mechanical frame counter to keep track of where it was, they beat the daylights out of those. The film transport system couldn’t take the beating required for random access, and of course if the frame you wanted to go to was a long way away it was hardly ‘random access.’ ” The AutoTutor had other quirks. “This was the noisiest damn thing,” says Gerry Faust, a PhD student of Stolurow’s. All that noise made for an unintended consequence. The computer would present a question to the student, and the student would select an answer. The computer would evaluate the student’s answer and then select what frame of film to next present to the student. To do so, it would have to run through the filmstrip, counting frames as it went, to find that next frame. Skinner would have had a field day with what happened next: everybody in the classroom would know if a student had chosen the right answer, because the AutoTutor would go PONNK, then ZZZZRRRRR as the filmstrip spun forward counting and looking for the next frame, but then it would stop almost immediately, as the next frame was not that far off. But if the student got the answer wrong…the AutoTutor would PONNK and then ZZZZRRRRR…but the ZZZZRRRRR would go on and on and on as the filmstrip kept rolling and the machine kept counting frames and seeking and spinning and ZZZRRRRing to right near the end of the reel—where the remedial material was located. At some point during all that counting and seeking and rolling and ZZZZRRRRRing the student would realize he was wrong before the AutoTutor could deliver the frame telling him he was wrong. The AutoTutor might as well have reached out with a robotic arm and placed a dunce cap on the student’s head. “I mean, it was great reinforcement, it had to be,” says Faust.

  “Oh, it clicked and clacked,” Anderson says, adding that “no interesting educational software was developed for that system.” In time Anderson would switch his own research to PLATO, which he found was turning into a more interesting platform.

  One of the undergraduate SOCRATES guinea pigs was Dick Butkus, a superstar linebacker on the Illinois football team who would become, as a player for the Chicago Bears, one of the greatest linebackers in NFL history. Students, including Butkus, who signed up to take classes like Psych 100 had a course requirement to volunteer so many hours to be involved in experiments, and it was Butkus’s fate to sit in front of AutoTutors pressing buttons and coping with PONNKs and ZZZZRRRRRs.

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  The SOCRATES project exemplifies a phenomenon that often occurs when psychologists and educational theorists lead the creation of a computer-based teaching system. The system’s design tends to reflect the theories held by the project leaders. It’s their baby; it shares their DNA. The design of Skinner’s and Crowder’s teaching machines reflected their theories. Now it was Stolurow’s turn. Stolurow lacked Bitzer’s technical abilities and intense engineering ambition, but for SOCRATES it wasn’t a matter of Go big or go home, but more a matter of Get good data or go home. He wanted data, and relied, as much as possible, on off-the-shelf hardware that was just good enough to do the job of collecting data that he could then study.

  Bitzer, a pure engineer at heart, held no firm theories of instruction or learning, nor any strong desire to see just one particular theory reflected in the hardware and software. Theories came and went; they changed like the seasons. Who knew what would become the latest hot notions of teaching and learning in the coming years? The only certainty is that they would change. Better to build a flexible system that’s capable of any kind of learning activity than build one restricting you in some way. While the earliest lessons on PLATO reflected simple but well-established, behaviorist, programmed-instruction models, underneath all that lay a desire to remain agnostic, detached from any one particular theory. If you wanted to build a lesson on PLATO that reflected your own pet theory, you should be able to go right ahead, as long as other authors could create their own lessons that followed other theories.

  Thomas Anderson, then an education professor at UI, says that in the 1960s, UI’s education department was strongly behaviorist, including Stolurow, but he did not see that thinking within Bitzer’s PLATO project. “You couldn’t really put them under any kind of psychological banner,” he says. “They just didn’t seem to be driven by psychological underpinnings. They were driven by a more pragmatic approach: you work with students, you work with content, you work with the technology, you put it together in a way that feels good and it will work. Whether it’s consistent with somebody’s psychology is a quickly irrelevant question.”

  Lezlie Fillman, who had been with PLATO since 1961, says Bitzer and Stolurow had almost opposite views about how a computer was going to support education. “Larry Stolurow’s was much more specific in ‘Give me the hardware to do the task I want to do,’ and Bitzer’s was ‘Give me the tasks you want to do, and let’s design hardware broad enough to take care of all of it.’ ”

  “People in the education faculty and the Training Research Lab believed that PLATO was all about technology seeking a role in education,” says Kenneth Smith, who consulted on SOCRATES. “And they believed that their position was much more secure and firmly rooted: it was education seeking a role for technology. So this tension sort of existed in the air.”

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  UI president David Dodds Henry, who had first seen a demo of PLATO in 1961, was a supporter of Alpert and the PLATO project. In 1965, he promoted Dan Alpert to be dean of the Graduate College, giving him a far greater degree of say in the university administration, as well as direct oversight of research goi
ng on in all of the university’s departments. It also meant that Alpert no longer was director of CSL. That meant he was no longer Bitzer’s direct boss.

  Alpert still wanted to have influence over CSL even though it no longer reported to him. The new director of CSL, W. Dale Compton, reported to William Everitt, dean of the Engineering School, just as Alpert had. Alpert’s tentacles were still trying to poke around CSL. “That was a source of some of the friction,” says Compton. “When he went to the graduate school…he wanted to retain his influence and the recognition of PLATO,” he says. “I don’t think it was quite so much as to control Bitzer but it was to be responsible for PLATO.”

  Compton was of two minds when it came to Don Bitzer. On the one hand he was impressed enough with Bitzer’s boundless inventiveness to write a letter of recommendation to Dean Everitt in January 1966 for the promotion of Bitzer to full professor. “It is not an over-statement,” he wrote, “to say that it is because of his enthusiasm, personal dedication, and extremely imaginative mind that the PLATO system has assumed its present eminence. No problem is too great, no situation too complicated, and no suggestion too far-reaching for him to comprehend and wrestle into submission.” But Compton was leery of Bitzer’s personality. “He grew up as the son of a used-car dealer, had some of the characteristics of a small-town businessperson who could live on the edge of legality. Very, very opinionated and very, very conscious and very vocal about his accomplishments, about what was due him.” He also saw that Bitzer was a bit of a wild man. “He was not a good administrator,” he says. “He just didn’t want to pay any attention to detail.” It was important that Bitzer had Gene Slottow and Tebby Lyman on the team, says Compton. They were more organized, more focused on details, making sure many of the more mundane things got done.

  “Alpert had been noticed in the administration of the university,” says Jack Desmond. “The orientation of Alpert and the orientation of Bitzer became a little bit more pronounced. Bitzer came from a business family and he was often warned by his father as he was embarking upon his graduate career, don’t be seduced by the university, because the big money is out here in private enterprise. And Bitzer really did have a business orientation. Alpert came from an industrial laboratory, in which things tended to be more programmed than the individual disciplinary orientation of the university, and I think somewhere along the line, Dan now being in a position of considerably greater power than he had been as director of CSL, certainly didn’t want the new director, Dale Compton, to be the new boss of PLATO. It was at that point where he essentially excised PLATO out of CSL and put it under the Graduate College, with presumably a broader charter for purposes of larger amounts of interaction by whatever discipline cared to write lessons for PLATO.”

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  Blomme was eventually snatched from SOCRATES and brought in to work on PLATO. Krueger followed shortly thereafter. One of the first things they realized was how inefficient it still was to author PLATO lessons. They were skeptical of Tebby Lyman’s project to create what was called the “GENERAL Logic,” a simple fill-in-the-blank kind of authoring tool that enabled a lesson author to create a PLATO lesson in less time than it would have taken previously. It still took way too much time.

  PLATO III lesson example, 1964 Credit 19

  For Blomme, the early years of PLATO represent a series of revolutions that were also taking place in computing in general. In just the span of seven years PLATO would evolve from punching in strange hexadecimal codes onto possibly hundreds of feet of oily paper tape, to editing in an authoring language on-screen. “I still remember,” he says, “like what ‘L5’ was, ‘clear and add’…and that’s how you programmed, you put down ‘L5,’ you typed that in the Flexowriter and punched the tape…you didn’t say ‘add,’ and so the idea of writing something to help you produce the program, that was a massive step.” CATO and FORTRAN and CATORES had arrived, making programming only a little bit easier. But then Scott Krueger showed up. He took one look at PLATO, and the conversation, according to Blomme, went something like this:

  KRUEGER: I want to design some characters.

  BLOMME: Oh, okay. Here’s a piece of graph paper, with a grid of lines on it, like a 16 x 16 grid, and then you locate all the dots you want on the screen, and then enter a bunch of parenthesis-surrounded pairs of numbers separated by commas into the system.

  KRUEGER: (after a long pause, then, whispering) You’ve got a graphical display here! Why aren’t you using it to design the characters?

  Scott Krueger, new to PLATO, fresh from SOCRATES, gazed upon the PLATO III system and saw right away one of its biggest weaknesses—something apparently everyone up to and including Bitzer had not yet noticed: it didn’t use the terminal screen to do the lesson authoring.

  Krueger went to work on a new utility program called CHARPLT (pronounced “char-plot”), an on-screen bitmap editor for creating not only text character sets, but also little graphical images. “That was a revolution,” says Blomme. “That changed what happened at the place.” We take for granted bitmap editors today. Up until CHARPLT came on the scene, all PLATO III authors were stuck using ugly uppercase letters to display computer-generated text on the screen, including anything the student typed. Suddenly, with CHARPLT, you could create lowercase letters and other text characters in your own designed typeface, and load them into your lesson. PLATO authors immediately saw the advantage of this approach and began using the tool right away. Soon, all kinds of new lowercase text and graphical images began appearing in lessons. In fact, it began to dawn on some authors that maybe they didn’t need to prepare fancy 35mm slides anymore, slides that, up until now, had been the basis for the “screens” in many PLATO lessons, with the ugly, bright, computer-generated uppercase text serving as prompts and student input, superimposed over the nicer-looking slides in the background.

  There was another unexpected consequence to the rapid adoption of CHARPLT. “Engineers came in one day,” says Blomme with a certain amount of glee, “and said, ‘What the hell are you guys doing? The storage tubes are overloaded. The voltage! You’ve got so much crap on the screen that we had to turn up the voltage.’ It changed the way the hardware was done, because there were so many more dots being put on the screen. We had uppercase, lowercase, special [characters]—and anybody could design this stuff.”

  Blomme and Krueger weren’t done yet. They realized there was another way to dramatically improve author productivity. They created an enormous, ambitious program, MONSTER, an acronym for “Multiple Online Nifty Speed and Terminal Editing Routine,” which enabled people to edit the code to their lessons right on the screen. Until MONSTER, authors endured an onerous process to insert, edit, or delete specific lines of code, by glancing at a printout, finding the line number, then using a teletype machine to type editing commands, the results of which were spat out by the teletype onto oily paper tape, which was then run through a reader to be stored on magnetic tape. Make one mistake, replace line number 751 when you meant line 752, and you could quickly wreak havoc on your whole program. Very often a new print of the code was necessary, since the line numbers kept changing with all the edits. The whole process was wasteful and time-consuming. With MONSTER, you looked at the screen, you saw your code, and you moved around in it and did what needed to be done, not unlike a present-day text editor. “That changed the world too,” says Blomme. Says one author who began to use MONSTER at the time, “You didn’t have to do these darn edit tapes anymore, and you could go off into the classroom and sit at a student terminal instead of having to be in the noisy computer room.”

  Recall that Bitzer’s original 1960 diagram of PLATO depicted a student in front of the screen and keyset. Halfway into the decade, it seemed like Bitzer, with his hardware orientation, was still thinking that only a student would ever actually sit down in front of a PLATO terminal. But Blomme and Krueger had a software orientation and the time had come for software people to make more of an impact on PLATO. With MONSTER and CHARPLT,
they hastened the demise of what might be called the Perseverance Era of authoring lessons on PLATO, ushering in in its stead the Productivity Era.

  During this time, entire classrooms of PLATO III terminals were built at locations around Champaign-Urbana, including Parkland College and Mercy Hospital, where Maryann Bitzer had developed a whole series of college-accredited PLATO lessons for nursing students. A program called TEXT TESTER was built in which material from textbooks was reproduced on slides, and then students would answer questions online relating to the material. Twenty lessons in seventh-grade remedial arithmetic were created with TEXT TESTER, as well as twelve lessons in political science. A series of circuit analysis lessons was developed for junior electrical engineering students. Twenty-eight lessons in library science were created. Lessons on FORTRAN programming, arrays of symbols for fourth graders, recursion for high schoolers, braille for blind students, French pronunciation and spelling, geometry, number bases, mathematical proofs, a genetics simulator for high schoolers, mechanical engineering lessons on beam construction, lessons in political science…the list kept growing.

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  Perhaps the core problem with SOCRATES, beyond its flimsy filmstrip terminal, was its funding source. Stolurow managed to line up funding from the Office of Naval Research, long one of the major sources of funding for PLATO and a stalwart source for CSL going back years. Alpert had deep ties with the brass at ONR and other federal agencies, and now ONR was pouring money into Stolurow’s Training Research Lab? This was not going to end well.