The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  It had only been three years earlier, in the summer of 1969, that Alpert had been heavily courted by Jack Goldman and Xerox to head up Xerox’s new research lab. He’d even been offered to take PLATO with him as an enticement. He’d turned all that down, counting on things continuing to progress in a positive direction at the University of Illinois, in terms of his own career and in terms of PLATO. This was not the outcome Alpert had hoped for. Suddenly, the Xerox deal looked a lot more attractive in hindsight. He would regret not taking that offer for the rest of his life.

  —

  From the outset, live demonstrations of PLATO had been crucial to the success of the project. By the 1970s, PLATO demos at CERL were so common that they became part of the daily culture of the place. To be at CERL was to be called upon at any moment to give a demo—or sometimes to be the demo. Don Bitzer, or one of the other higher-ups, might suddenly appear with someone important by his side, asking you to show his guest a thing or two. You’d be there typing away at your keyboard and you’d suddenly notice people looming over your shoulder. Don’t mind us, we’re just going to watch what you’re doing there….Now that’s interesting, how’d you do that?…Can you show us that again?…and you realized only then that you’d been roped into giving a demo. There was no way out. It was the price you paid for the privilege of using PLATO.

  At any given moment would appear some entourage from another university, or executives from some American company, or Japanese company (sometimes a literal busload of Japanese industrialists), or representatives from government agencies, be they American or from a foreign nation. People would appear, scheduled or unscheduled; if scheduled, expecting a tour, in which they’d stream through the various halls of the frumpy old building, peek in a room or two, stop by one of the more presentable rooms where demos were held, meet a few of the staff, and sometimes make it all the way up to the penthouse on the fifth floor, where many of the “junior systems programmers” stayed up all night, working on some of the more exotic projects, and they’d be asked to give yet more demos. Roger Johnson recalls one time he was suddenly asked by Bitzer to lead a group of Japanese industrialists around the lab. They had shown up with cameras, appeared not to understand a word of English, and, to Johnson’s dismay, dispersed to various floors of the building on their own. Johnson found some of them snapping photos of every piece of equipment in the upstairs labs where the plasma display was being created.

  “I tell ya, something magical about Don Bitzer was that he had infinite cool,” says Sherwin Gooch. “He would bring people around to give these demos, but unlike anyplace else I’ve ever worked, he never told us about them and he never warned us. He never [said], ‘This is important because NSF’s going to be here’ and ‘We got to get our next thirty million dollars’—he never, ever, ever did anything like that. He just would bring people in and show them what was really going on and so it never interfered with our progress.” There was one price the staff had to pay for that “infinite cool,” however, says Gooch: “He almost never told us who these visitors were that he brought in.” Sometimes there was good reason for not identifying who the visitors were. On some occasions the suits that walked down the hallway and sequestered themselves in the conference room were very shy about having their presence known in the building. Those meetings led to two very secretive groups signing contracts for PLATO terminals to dial into the CERL PLATO system in the mid-1970s. One was the National Security Agency and the other was the Central Intelligence Agency. Even forty years after the fact, the few CERL staffers who even knew about their existence remain hard-pressed to acknowledge that the NSA and CIA were on PLATO. Garrie Burr, one of the CERL field technicians, remembers visiting Fort Meade from time to time. “It was almost impossible to get on the facility,” he says, “but once you got on the facility…well, you had somebody with you even going to the bathroom, I mean there was somebody always with you.” Oddly, he says, when you left, nobody checked your car. “I mean, you could have walked off with the store. Nobody checked your car! Only problem was getting in. Once you were in, getting out was no problem.” Both agencies had a small number of terminals—the CIA’s were believed to be installed at the Warrenton Training Facility, though no one would confirm or deny. It is presumed that their main use was for developing online language training. The general assumption was that by the 1980s, in addition to a number of separate military and nonmilitary government-run PLATO systems, both the NSA and CIA had their own systems, for use in computer-based training. “I had gone to a few of those sites,” says Jim Ghesquiere, a CERL staffer during the 1970s who then worked at Control Data, “that are typically off-limits, most people aren’t aware of a lot of the government sites. Control Data had many people who were on-site on a government site all the time. And, they would only come maybe once or twice a year to the Control Data building, say for a project kick-off meeting or something like that. And they spent 100 percent of their time working at various government, military, intelligence sites, and they could never talk about what they were doing. I know there was a lot of linguistics work done with the PLATO system at several of the government sites.”

  Ironically, a CERL technician responsible for maintenance and repair of the NSA’s terminals at Fort Meade once admitted that the only time he could ever recall a PLATO terminal being stolen anywhere in the U.S., in all the years he worked at CERL, was the time one was stolen right off the loading dock of the NSA. “I can remember it getting stolen,” says Bitzer. “It was stolen from NSA….I thought that was really funny that the terminal disappeared from NSA.”

  The parade of CERL visitors never stopped. You could wave your hands and draw figures on the board and talk about PLATO to visitors all you wanted, but only when people saw it firsthand, caught a glimpse of the Orange Glow coming from a PLATO terminal’s screen, watched as they reached out and actually touched the screen and saw how the act of physically touching the orange screen caused something to happen, and then invited the visitor to reach out themselves and touch the screen too, and witness the machine reacting to being touched it had a visceral, “holy-crap-is-this-the-future-or-what” reaction.

  Demos happened all over the world. In the 1960s most of the demos had been domestic. From presentations at major academic conferences to Rotary Club affairs in some small town, it didn’t seem to matter: Bitzer made time to be there. As the government funding and the support from Control Data grew, so did the ambition to expose the world to the Friendly Orange Glow. Bitzer, and sometimes a complete entourage, including Maryann and occasionally son David in tow, would hop on a plane and show off PLATO in France, Italy, Romania, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, or Holland.

  Practitioners from other institutions attempting to show off their own computer creations were often frustrated with PLATO, because the crowds instantly gravitated to the Friendly Orange Glow. John Seely Brown, who in the early 1970s at the University of Michigan was developing an “intelligent tutoring system” called SOPHIE (short for “SOPHisticated Instructional Environment”) that used aspects of artificial intelligence and natural-language processing to enhance the dialogue between the electronic tutor and the human student, vividly remembers PLATO stealing SOPHIE’s thunder. “I had progressed in the first six months of the SOPHIE contract and I had to go out to Lowry Air Force Base to have a contract review. And, there was a PLATO terminal. And on the one hand we were there giving a demo on some faiirrrrrrly provocative uses of intelligence—providing a completely new kind of electronic learning environment—and somebody came in with a PLATO terminal and turned it on and drew a picture of a rose, and I was blown away how people would just gravitate to looking at that rose on this PLATO terminal versus what I thought of course was the world’s most significant breakthrough in terms of how to embed intelligence into the learning environment, into the tutoring environment. That was my first exposure to PLATO.”

  “There was always a standing joke,” says CERL technician G
arrie Burr, “that Don would demonstrate the system to anybody. Even the janitor who was sweeping the floor when we were setting up. He’d give the same kind of demo to the janitor that he’d give to the executives he was going to meet the next day. They all got the same show. Don said more than once, ‘You never know where your next nickel’s comin’ from.’ ”

  Paul Tenczar believes PLATO represented the state of the art for educational computing throughout the 1970s. To wander the halls of CERL during this era gave one the impression that the staff certainly believed it. “Working with Stan Smith,” says Ruth Chabay, “I was based in the Chemistry Building, but every day we’d walk over to CERL, and go up to the second floor, where, in the early days, the authors were all working…and just walk down the second-floor hall, it was not a very long hall….It could take three hours to walk down the hallway, because you got into so many conversations and arguments and debates and saw so many exciting things and you discussed whether this was a good approach or not—the environment was amazingly intense. And so I think that a lot of that stuff happened informally, there was a tremendous sense of excitement—we learned to seek each other out both online and offline just to see what was going on.”

  Chabay was a graduate student in chemical physics, used to working with computers as number-crunching devices, not as automatic teachers. If a visitor receiving a PLATO IV demo had had any exposure (outside PLATO III) to computers in education up to the early 1970s, it was typically in the form of teletypes. “Interactivity was using a paper teletype,” Chabay says, “and typing characters on a teletype and seeing it slowly chunk back, and the kind of educational use of computing that we all knew about at the time was drill and practice on teletypes where the teletype would print ‘3 + 5 =’ and then the student had to press a key, saying 8.” To then get a demo of the PLATO IV system was to experience Toffler’s Future Shock up close and personal. “To most people at the time,” Chabay says, “this stuff seemed like stuff from outer space. When you’d demonstrate this, people sort of didn’t believe you some of the time.”

  Children and teens, on the other hand, had no problem using the system. They took to it like ducks to water. Unlike today, with the proliferation of digital devices everywhere and most people, including kids, having extensive experience with online services, apps, games, productivity tools, social media, and so on, computers were not a part of daily life in the 1970s, particularly for schoolchildren but neither for college students. The constant assumption that a designer of an educational PLATO lesson had to maintain was that the student using the lesson may have never sat in front of a computer before. Most likely, this was a first-time experience for the student, regardless of age.

  One outcome of all the demonstrations was that a lot of people got to see PLATO. By 1972, PLATO had been a fixture in one form or another on the University of Illinois campus for a dozen years. But its footprint was small. With the arrival of hundreds of PLATO IV terminals with their high-resolution, graphical, orange-glowing screens, there was reason for professors and department heads to check out PLATO all over again. Many did. What they discovered was a state-of-the-art system whose capability seemed endless, and an eager and helpful laboratory in CERL, proud of what they had built and enthusiastic about getting the system out into the world. Professors were invited, encouraged, to design their own lessons for their students, however they wished. The idea, dosed with a heap of wishful thinking, was that professors—without requiring any prior computer experience—could take advantage of a powerful authoring language in TUTOR (with more tools on the way all the time) and design instructional material that fit in with their teaching style, their syllabus, their approach, and their needs. PLATO and TUTOR amounted to a theory of “if we build it, they will come.” Luckily for CERL, many professors showed up and gave the system a try.

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  What follows is a brief overview of some of the ways PLATO was used to teach people from first grade through college:

  Elementary Mathematics

  When NSF funded PLATO IV in 1972, the money was earmarked not only for hardware and system software, but for lesson development and delivery to live students in K–12 and college settings. One area of concentration was elementary mathematics. For this, CERL managed to attract a nationally known educator, Robert Davis, an MIT math PhD who had moved to Syracuse University to run the Madison Project, a recipient of significant NDEA funding after Sputnik. John E. Corbally, the new UI president, recommended to CERL that Davis head up the elementary math project. Davis brought with him Don Cohen and Jerry Glynn, who had both worked with him on the Madison Project. Davis would have his plate full: in addition to running the elementary math project at CERL, he became an associate director of CERL, joined the education department as a professor, and even signed on as principal over at Uni High. For the elementary math project at CERL he lined up formidable talent, including research assistants Sharon Dugdale, Dave Kibbey, and Barry Cohen, who formed the fractions curriculum team, and Charles Weaver, Esther Steinberg, and Bonnie Seiler (née Anderson) for the whole numbers curriculum team. Cohen and Glynn were new to computers, says Seiler, “but they very much knew his philosophy of math is a story of the real world, and so we kind of adapted some of those things to PLATO and some of that worked and didn’t work so well. But one thing I remember: [Davis] said, for the first year, just to try things. He didn’t say, ‘We’re going to make a curriculum for X grade or X topic,’ we just played and we saw what we could do and couldn’t do and then after the first year, some decisions were made like, ‘We’re going to do third grade to sixth.’ ” Says Kibbey, “We started as programmers, but Bob’s approach was more like ‘Start creating.’ The atmosphere was, ‘Here’s this new thing, what can we do with it? What’s possible to do on this?’ Instead of ‘Here’s a bunch of lessons that we’re going to program.’ ”

  They began learning TUTOR on this new thing called PLATO IV, and realized there was a lot that they could do with it. It was the summer of 1972, and many regular staffers disappeared for vacation, leaving plenty of terminals free on the second floor of CERL and a minimum of distracting meetings. They referred to a UICSM math textbook for inspiration, but often created their own lessons in reaction to something they felt was too boring in the textbook. For example, there was a recipe activity, where kids would make cookies using a half cup of this and a quarter cup of that. “Making cookies is not very exciting,” says Kibbey. “It’s much more interesting to make monsters.” That gave them an idea for a Make-a-Monster lesson, using the graphics capabilities of TUTOR, the plasma display, and the touch panel. The textbook also mentioned making and slicing pies, which they transformed into pizzas, which became another lesson: how to slice up enough pieces of pizza so everyone got a piece.

  Darts lesson Credit 24

  One of the fractions group’s early lessons was Darts, designed by Sharon Dugdale, which would become a perennial kids’ favorite for years to come. Darts dealt with fractions. Whole numbers were commonly taught by teachers everywhere and all schools considered them important. Fractions, on the other hand, tended to receive less attention and were ineffectively taught. “Fractions,” Dugdale says, “was an area that people seem to consider universally problematic and difficult to teach.” When Davis was doing the Madison Project at Syracuse, he had fostered a new approach for teaching fractions using coordinate geometry and number lines. Up until this time teachers around the country were not typically teaching fractions using this approach. Davis had offered the fractions curriculum to Dugdale and Kibbey after finding reluctance from other researchers, who held that fourth graders lacked the “mathematical maturity” to handle fractions, so they were sometimes left until eighth-grade algebra. “That would have set the U.S. way back,” says Kibbey. Dugdale was keen to get kids in earlier grades exposed to fractions, so that they were better equipped to enter junior high.

  Darts reflected this new thinking. On the screen was a vertical number line acting as the wall
onto which PLATO threw darts. At various points up and down the wall were balloons of various shapes. The goal of the game was to tell PLATO where to throw the dart at the various points on the number line in order to precisely hit the balloons. Each level of the game presented a different number line scale (it might be -1 through 1, or 0 through 5) and a different placement, number, and even size, of balloons. As a student got more proficient at the game, the levels got harder and the balloons got smaller and more numerous. The student had to figure out where exactly a balloon was situated on the number line. If it was between, say, 1 and 2, was it “1½”? Was it “1¼”? Thanks to the TUTOR language’s flexible answer judging (a powerful system capability that set PLATO above competing computer-based education systems not only at the time, but largely forty years later), students could write “1½” or “1¼” or they could use decimals and write “1.5” or “1.25.” They could even enter expressions, like “2+⅔,” “½-.03,” and “(5+⅚)/2-1/10.” The lesson kept track of the student’s balloon hits and misses, and moved them up the levels of difficulty as they got better.

  Torpedo, another lesson focused on similar fractions problems, presented a situation where a student could play against other students or play against PLATO. The player operated a submarine deep in the ocean, above which swam occasional fish, octopi, and other creatures, and at the surface was a ship. The ocean surface served as the number line, this time horizontal, and the player needed to move their sub backward (by entering the desired negative amount, be it an integer or a fraction) or forward, and then the sub would fire a torpedo upward in an effort to hit the enemy ship. If some creature were in-between, it might get hit by the torpedo instead. The game resembled the popular video arcade game Space Invaders that would come out years later, although with Space Invaders there was no need to know anything about fractions; players simply moved a joystick left or right and fired away. Some schools had hoped to assign strict, prescribed PLATO time for the kids: six minutes here, twelve minutes there. What they found instead were kids playing Torpedo and Darts for hours on end, being forced to get off the machine by the janitors who were closing up the classrooms for the night.