by Brian Dear
“I gather the people at ONR in Washington had some questions by people around the country as to why they were funding two systems at Illinois,” says Stolurow, admitting that the situation was “somewhat of a sore point.” The point grew sorer once Alpert became dean of the Graduate College. “Illinois had a plan whereby external research funds were funneled, were divided up, so that the graduate dean’s office, the department, and the actual investigator’s unit get various percentages of the overhead,” says Stolurow. Alpert invited Stolurow to visit his office to talk about SOCRATES and PLATO. “He made it emphatically clear that there would be only one CAI [computer-assisted instruction] system on campus, and any proposal I would submit to an external agency including ONR—who had been funding me—would have to go clear through the graduate dean’s office. So I found myself in a strange predicament. Obviously he was going to make PLATO ‘it’ and see that we didn’t continue.”
Rupert Evans, who had become dean of the School of Education, believes Alpert and Bitzer were afraid PLATO would lose its funding because the federal government might look at two competing proposals at the same university and fund neither. Evans, even decades later, was still incensed about the SOCRATES fiasco. “This is the only instance of which I am aware in which a small, tightly knit group of people who have a vested interest in one research project were able to keep another, competing project from submitting a proposal to an outside group and thus driving a highly competent professor to leave his employment. My only regret is that I didn’t resign in protest. Looking back, I am ashamed that I did not do exactly that.
“Bitzer and Alpert really wanted to run the thing themselves,” says Evans, “and they were not really interested in getting input from anybody else.” Compton believes there was another factor at play between the two camps: “It was just plain jealousy. Bitzer had no regard for anybody who was a competitor.”
Stolurow resigned and moved to Harvard, a community that at that time lacked the spark, the will, or the vision to undertake building a major computer-based education project rivaling PLATO. He would never regain his stature in the field.
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With Alpert kicked upstairs to a high administrative position elsewhere in the university, PLATO was vulnerable. Its funding was vulnerable. Who was going to write the proposals? Who was shaking the hands—who knew which hands to shake—of the Washington civilian and military brass who signed the checks? Who was going to decide how that money was spent? Alpert had overseen Bitzer and the PLATO and plasma panel projects for five years. And every day that went by, PLATO got more sophisticated, more interesting and compelling, and the plasma panel got closer and closer to becoming something that could be installed in terminals. This was not the time to stunt the growth of these projects: this was the time to give them plenty of water and sunshine.
When Compton took over CSL, one of the things he learned was that the team working on the PLATO plasma display was part of CSL—all or part of their pay came from CSL—so they were not exactly tied to the PLATO project per se. That was another source of friction. “There’s always friction with Don because he always wants more than his share of the resources….I was trying to encourage a broader display activity that would include other types of displays. He was violent about—really upset about—that, because he saw the possibility of some resources not going his way.” Newspaper and television reporters would visit the lab, see the plasma display prototypes, and immediately envision a future of flat-screen televisions, then go back to their offices and publish stories that talked about wall TVs (“TV of Future: Wire-Brained Looking Glass,” blared one Chicago Tribune headline of the time). Bitzer would bristle at such notions, insisting that the mission was PLATO, that the plasma display was for education. The idea that some of his people might be working on plasmas for television use and not PLATO was not acceptable. “He just did not want anything competing, and of course he had Alpert’s backing, and so, it was impossible to do anything,” says Compton.
It was not long before the micromanaging by Alpert, now graduate dean, of PLATO and Bitzer within CSL pushed Compton too far. “Dan kept intruding, and I got so fed up with him I said one time, ‘Why in the hell don’t you transfer it out if you don’t like the way I’m doing it?’ And so they did.” According to Compton, the dean of engineering, William Everitt, to whom CSL reported, was not even consulted about the move. Alpert just went and did it. “That kind of illustrates it,” Compton says.
It was October 1966 and PLATO was once again under Alpert’s wing. “And then something begins to happen one gets mixed reactions on,” says Jack Desmond, “and that is, Bitzer’s overwhelming self-confidence and brashness. It excited many people, and it turned a lot of other people off, because it tended to be heaped out in fairly large doses. There was no denying that here was a true believer and someone who was committed and enthusiastic and was indeed showing great progress toward allowing this development to germinate, and it was largely his doing.”
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It is at this point that a gentleman named Louis Volpp enters the picture, right after he had chosen a path that should have caused him to not enter it at all. Volpp was a professor and associate director in the Graduate School of Business at UI. He had received an offer, around 1965, to take his family abroad to Malta for a year-long university appointment there. “My family and I all had our shots,” he says, “and I was sitting in my office signing the letter of acceptance and I had a call from Lyle Lanier, who was provost.” Lanier told Volpp to hold off signing the letter and come see him first. When he did, Lanier offered him a promotion to associate provost, which Volpp accepted, canceling his Malta plans.
One of Volpp’s new duties was to deal with the State Technical Services Act of 1965, a new federal law described by Congress as “a bill to promote economic growth by supporting state and regional centers to place the findings of science usefully in the hands of American enterprise.” The University of Illinois, being the largest such “state center” in Illinois, needed to coordinate with the state government in Springfield on how exactly to comply with this new law. Although still the associate provost, Volpp in effect became the de facto chief of technical services for the state of Illinois. “That brought me in contact with Dan Alpert,” he says, “because as dean he was also the administrator in charge of research programs at the university and one of my state functions was to evaluate research proposals and allocate funds under this act to the various researchers in different universities.” The two worked together on numerous fronts regarding research proposals, federal and state grants, and statewide community services. In 1966, Alpert recommended to Lyle Lanier that Volpp should be director of the PLATO laboratory that had been wrestled away from CSL.
The point was emphasized to Volpp that CSL had a full slate of physics, engineering, and chemistry projects, and PLATO had become tangential. Alpert helped CSL find a brand-new building to move to, and PLATO took over the entire Power House building.
Bitzer had not expected that Alpert wanted someone else to run the new lab, leading to more friction. Alpert wanted someone with a business orientation to run the organization, and handed Bitzer the role of technical director. For Bitzer this meant that for the first time in PLATO’s history there would be a layer between him and Alpert.
Up until the split from CSL, the PLATO project had relied on Alpert and others within CSL to handle its finances. The new lab would now have to manage finances on its own. Volpp set out to do just that, cleaning up what he regarded as a managerial mess. “I wanted…to set up some decent internal controls, good financial controls, good cost accounting, some of those things, so that we’d know where we stood because it was, well, sort of chaotic beforehand. And so I worked on that and tried to get that straightened out and get people involved in it in that way.”
It took a while to name the lab. “We futzed around for the better part of two months for a title,” says Volpp, “and we didn’t come up with anything, that’s why w
e ended up with that clumsy thing, the ‘Computer-based Education Research Lab.’ ” And with that CERL was born.
Volpp’s previous office had been in UI’s Business School, “a marvelous old building,” he says. Now he found himself in the Power House. It was old as well, but was not marvelous. What he found were spartan digs. “It was higher quality than things built in Russia,” he says, but “it didn’t have any frills, it didn’t have anything that was nice, it didn’t have anything that was elegant, it had no charm, it was just a building to get work done in.” Volpp’s own office was a tiny square room in a hallway full of such rooms. “I remember our furniture was so rickety that I had a desk that had a single pedestal. It was an old oak desk and it was kind of a mess, but it was functional. Somebody came in the lab one day and said, ‘You know, you really ought to have a nicer desk than that.’ And so that weekend I went over and I painted the darn thing. And that was my nicer desk. People there didn’t fuss at all about that kind of thing. It was getting the work done and making PLATO work and teaching with it that really counted.”
Volpp got to know people around the lab, including Tebby Lyman. Her real name was Elisabeth, but as a child she liked to spell her first name backward—“Htebasile”—and that evolved and morphed into the shorter form, “Tebby.” Her husband, Ernest Lyman, ran the Betatron project that Andrew Hanson’s father had worked on. She was also a physicist, but ran into the problem so many women of science ran into in the 1950s and 1960s: universities made it nearly impossible for a woman scientist to have any significant role as a professor—if they could even get that title. So she wound up working at CSL and then at CERL. “She worked closely with Don,” Volpp says, and what he and numerous others had found with Tebby was that she provided some adult supervision to the wild-man side of Bitzer. “She was a real smoothing influence on getting the educational components developed. Don was an extraordinarily creative guy, and I can remember the first time he ever got his flat panel display to work, he had four dots that lit up and he came running down the hall saying, ‘It works! It works!’ and we all came down and looked at his tiny, tiny plasma display.”
It took no time for Volpp to see what kind of creative force Bitzer was. “Don also did all the stuff to get the telephone company to put in a proper substation that would handle the remote connections into PLATO,” he says. “They were convinced it wouldn’t work, and he demonstrated to them that it would.” But Volpp would discover that Bitzer’s creative thinking extended far beyond PLATO. “He and I attended a seminar on the physiology of the ear, on teaching the deaf to hear,” he says. “And the professor who was presenting his findings and his thoughts and his concepts started talking about the ear, the inner ear, and how it works and what was happening and immediately Don lit up and he said, ‘Oh. That’s how this works.’ And he started explaining to the specialist what was really going on in the propagation of sound into electrical waves for the brain, and I think he had heard of it for the first time right there, but bang-go, he had it, and then the two of them did some work together, because they really struck up a kind of technological spark with each other. But it’s just the kind of person he was that he would just—I want to use this in the best sense—‘fire off.’ Something would trigger in him and he would have ideas that would make the experts really impressed. And I really enjoyed working with him and around him and observing that.”
One incident at CERL would influence Volpp’s thinking about students, learning, and teaching for years afterward. “There was a young lady taking the obstetric nursing course,” he says, “who apparently had failed her exam and was going to be failed out of the nursing school. And they said, ‘She likes this course so much, let’s let her finish this.’ So, she kept coming, I think it was four o’clock in the afternoon, when that nursing course was on, and she would always have to be kicked out of the lab at the end of the time because she would run into the next class. She would not give up on it. She just kept going and kept going and kept going. And that was one of the things Tebby had to do was go in and say, ‘Now you must leave as the next class has to start.’ So Tebby kept kicking her out. And it turned out that this young lady took some national exam after that even though she was going to fail out of nursing school, and she scored very high in the nation. It may be even number one in the nation…she had an extraordinarily high score.” The nursing instructors and CERL staff could not understand how that could be.
Luckily, PLATO recorded every keystroke, enabling instructors to go back and see how a student had gone through the lessons, keystroke by keystroke, even how much time they took to answer questions and read a page of text, to get insight into the student’s thinking and learning process. When they looked at this nursing student’s data, they discovered something extraordinary. They found out that this young lady had an entirely different learning style, leading them to theorize that might be why she was not doing well in nursing school. “So they decided to keep her,” Volpp says. “They told her what her objectives were and they turned her loose to do it her own way and she did very well. And I often thought about that when I was teaching a regular stand-up course, that somebody didn’t catch on, I always wondered, Is it that their learning style doesn’t match my teaching style? and tried to find new ways, but that always kept haunting me all the rest of my career. That you really better pay attention to that.”
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While PLATO III experienced a slow, steady increase in the number of lessons being created by authors using CATO, the growth was not yet impressive enough. Authoring was difficult and painstaking work, often requiring programming help. Tebby Lyman tried to relieve author frustrations by creating the GENERAL Logic, but the going was still slow. While the number of student terminals was gradually growing thanks to a few new PLATO III classroom sites installed at Parkland College, Mercy Hospital, and nearby grade schools, there were still impediments to authors working simultaneously online. Time-sharing was great for students, but authors were not so lucky. Even MONSTER, the editor created by Blomme and Krueger, only skimmed the surface of problems authors faced. Only two authors could work simultaneously using MONSTER. Most elusive of all was the fact that authors did not have a real programming language in which to work. One designed by authors for authors.
The GENERAL Logic represented, according to John Gilpin, a quick-and-dirty solution to the problem of authoring. “The PLATO project had always gotten by,” he says, “by Don’s brilliant ability to make multiple uses of small resources….They didn’t have very much in the way of programming resources to devote to anything, so the idea was that they would use what they had to produce the GENERAL Logic and then all sorts of people could come in and write their own lessons by substituting parameters into the GENERAL Logic. And what became clear over the next three or four years was that, well, even though the GENERAL Logic was pretty close to what most people wanted, who wanted to do programmed-instruction-type instruction, it was never quite what anybody wanted.” The result was that authors began tweaking the GENERAL Logic itself to be better attuned to the specific needs of that author’s lesson. Then another author would come along, copy the previous author’s modified version of GENERAL, go to town, tweak it a little more, and there were now multiple versions of GENERAL. “If anything was discovered that was a flaw in the original,” Gilpin says, “it was already propagated to all these offshoots….The whole thing turned out to be kind of self-defeating.” Some authors decided to bypass GENERAL altogether and write their own “logics” or hire programmers to do it for them.
Gilpin had hired a programmer to create some UICSM math lessons for him, but wound up doing the work himself. In time, he was no longer going around looking for help. Instead, people were coming to him for help. “Very soon I found myself in the role of being the trainer for PLATO,” Gilpin says, offering seminars and showing people how to develop lessons on PLATO. At one seminar Gilpin met a biology graduate student named Paul Tenczar. “He was very straightforward and outspok
en,” says Gilpin, exclaiming to Gilpin things like I don’t want to do GENERAL, and How do I get an arrow on the screen? There was no easy answer: if there wasn’t a way in GENERAL to do something, you had to fall back to CATO and FORTRAN, and even assembly language if you dared, and custom-build it yourself. Tenczar, unhappy with how hard it was to develop on PLATO, nevertheless pressed on, hanging around and asking more questions. “You could check the computer out for three or four hours,” says Tenczar. “You might change three or four spelling errors and three or four things in an hour’s worth of work.” In nine months he had managed to get three interactive pages of material up and running in a lesson. “And I was as top-notch as they could ever expect in a programmer to do this type of thing.” One enormous time-burner was compiling a program. Says Jim Payne, who worked on a number of PLATO III lessons, including, over several years, a few foreign-language lessons for Professor Keith Meyer, “I spent several all-nighters there. Just because it took twenty minutes to compile the program. There’s only so many edits you can make in the course of the evening.”
In the spring of 1967, Bitzer and Max Beberman asked Gilpin to run a National Science Foundation–sponsored Summer Institute, inviting educators from around the country to learn how to develop lessons on PLATO. Gilpin agreed to run it. One night Tenczar stayed up late transforming some of the authoring routines that were available—largely packages of FORTRAN subroutines and procedure libraries that any author could take advantage of so they didn’t have to rewrite everything from scratch. An idea came to him that there might be a better way around all this mess. Up until that time the main way to use all these procedures was to call them using the “CALL” statement. For example, to erase the entire storage tube (thus erasing a student’s display), you could issue a “CALL ERASE” command. To display one of the prepared 35mm slides for a student terminal, you issued a “CALL SLIDE(N)” statement, where “N” was the number of the slide you wanted to show. If you wanted to plot some text, you issued a “CALL PLOT()” subroutine and passed it a bunch of variables including the X and Y location on the screen along with the text you wanted displayed. But first you had to call all sorts of other subroutines before you could even do the CALL PLOT(). It was all very cumbersome.
