The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we’d be lucky if we just broke even.

  —Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

  22

  The Business Opportunity

  All during the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, the number Bitzer had bandied about to describe the scale of the upcoming PLATO IV system was “four thousand ninety-six.” That was how many terminals were going to be supported. The media reported this number for years. By 1971, before PLATO IV was even rolled out, a background paper prepared by Bitzer and Alpert that was widely distributed to members of Congress, academics, and think tanks, expected a four-thousand-terminal system to be operational “by the mid- to late-1970s.” A Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette article that year announced that “the goal is to have 4,000 in use by the end of 1974.” In reality, in all the years CERL’s system would be operational, it would never reach even half that number, but that didn’t stop the prognostications about what was coming next. In the span of only two years since PLATO IV had gone operational, a new number was starting to be mentioned—a number so huge as to defy belief. Thousands of terminals were one thing, but now Bitzer was starting to talk about a million terminals, an entirely different ball game. No wonder the “troika” of owners—Bitzer, Propst, and Alpert—of Education and Information Systems, Inc., the company building the multimedia peripheral hardware for the PLATO IV terminals, were so gung ho on the future: they stood to make a lot of money.

  The notion of a million terminals was floating around in the public as early as 1974, when Ted Nelson mentioned it in Dream Machines, except he added another twist, stating that Control Data Corporation “is said to be projecting ONE MILLION PLATO TERMINALS BY 1980.” It was never explained how this might be possible, where the demand would come from, or who would pay for it, but the rumors, exciting ones for sure, continued to swirl.

  —

  In mid-September 1975, Robert J. Seidel, an experimental psychology PhD who worked at the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO), a Washington, D.C., area government consulting firm, hosted along with the National Science Foundation a conference at the Airlie Conference Center—a posh, rural Virginia hideaway retreat, featuring its own airplane runway, an hour west of Washington. The event echoed back to the 1958 “Automatic Teaching” conference held in Philadelphia attended by the teaching machine and programmed instruction luminaries of the time, including Skinner, Pressey, Crowder, and Stolurow. Seidel’s sixty invited participants included Bitzer; Suppes; Papert; Bunderson; Stolurow; J. C. R. Licklider, Marvin Minsky from MIT; Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month; John Shoch from Xerox PARC; and Andrew Molnar from NSF. The purpose of the conference was to “identify key developments in computer and communications technology that are expected to have major impact by 1985” in the field of education.

  Seidel had high hopes for the conference, including that the attendees would reach consensus on the need to include some fundamental, psychologically sound, practical, instructional theories into the designs of systems of the future. His aims were not achieved.

  “My problem with all of these folks,” says Seidel, “they’re all messiahs!” The luminaries in the computer-based education field were all visionaries, each respective vision different from the others in important ways. The common thread seemed to be ego. By the end of the conference Seidel realized that these visionaries, including Bitzer, were all stubbornly sticking to their original visions. “He was a very pleasant guy, a very charming guy,” says Seidel, “so long as you didn’t get into questioning much about PLATO. That was like a closed book. And it stayed that way, as far as he was concerned. It was the answer….When I talked to Minsky, he had his view of artificial intelligence and that was the answer for everything. And Papert had the answer in LOGO for everything. Don had the answer in PLATO for everything. It was his approach, and he wouldn’t leave that plasma terminal either.” Dave Liddle, who worked on the plasma panel project at Owens-Illinois and later joined Xerox PARC, shared similar opinions of Papert and Bitzer, the latter whom he measured at 700 “milliPaperts,” explaining that “if the unit of arrogance is one Papert, okay, he’s about a point-seven instead of Seymour.”

  His presentation was pure Bitzer: part genius display, part used-car sales pitch, part magic show, all fascinating and at the same time outrageously provocative. He and PLATO were just the kind of thing that drove computer scientists—and a lot of educators—crazy. He gave his talk an equally provocative title, “The Million Terminal System of 1985” (over the course of the year, the prediction had been pushed out five years), suggesting it was a done deal already. The vision he laid out shocked the audience, his statements brazen, confident, and not a little bit arrogant. After the presentation, one participant would say, “I think the size of Bitzer’s plans probably does as much to inspire awe, jealousy, and fear as anyone who has ever done publicly funded projects in this area.”

  But Bitzer had more surprises for the gathered audience. The one-million number certainly inspired awe, but what he was envisioning was not only an educational system, but something that today we would recognize as the Internet. He had begun to believe that there was no way a large, centralized system was ever going to scale to a national level if it were dedicated solely to education. There had to be more to the system. Something had changed in Bitzer. This was not the same story he had presented when seeking funds from NSF not so long before. He had a sense that additional capabilities had to be available in any large-scale national system. Features, no doubt, that facilitated communications, collaboration, creativity, and recreation. There’s no surprise that these were the very things that PLATO’s own user community—particularly the new wave kids—had sprung onto the system, on their own, in the three years prior to Bitzer’s presentation.

  “I don’t think that computers which are designed only for education will survive,” Bitzer told the audience, ostensibly in reference to Stolurow’s SOCRATES and Bunderson’s TICCIT, but there was more to it than that. “They must have all kinds of applications to survive in the marketplace. We have computers, terminals, communications, facilities, and we have to provide a service. You can have the first three lined up, but if your service is limited, you can forget it. So just having technology isn’t going to help you. You have to have desirable services available.”

  By 1975 Bitzer’s vision for PLATO was still fixated on a large centralized mainframe computer to which were to be connected thousands of what he liked to call “graphics terminals.” The only difference between what he envisioned for PLATO IV back in 1968 and what he was envisioning in 1975 was the scale. His revised, broader vision did not contemplate nor include microcomputers, which were still in their infancy. The same week Bitzer gave this presentation, microcomputer hobbyists, including Steve Wozniak, who had already begun working on what would soon be known as the Apple I, were meeting at the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley. Despite the fact that CERL and Xerox PARC had opened their respective labs to each other and offered demos and hands-on experiences and dialogue, none of what was brewing in Silicon Valley either in corporate offices or hackers’ garages was affecting Bitzer’s vision. He was a true believer in the PLATO way, and he wanted to see it scaled to gigantic proportions. Go big or go home.

  “It is an entirely different game,” he told the audience, “when you consider the million-terminal network. My forecast, based on our present plans, calls for, by 1980–1985, a million-terminal network, consisting of two hundred fifty central processing systems all tied together, communicating with each other and shifting loads if one starts to go down.” As preposterous as it sounded at the time, one need only consider that major Web services today, be it Facebook or Google, have hundreds of thousands if not millions of rack-mounted servers in multiple football-field-sized data centers. Those servers are all tied together, communicating with each other and shifting loads if one starts to
go down. The only major difference is what devices the end users would be sitting in front of.

  When Seidel published the proceedings of the conference in book form two years later, one thing stood out: only Bitzer’s chapter included not only the talk he gave, but also a transcript of a forty-five-minute heated question-and-answer session that immediately followed.

  During that heated debate the audience attempted to absorb the staggering numbers and brazen vision Bitzer laid out for them. At one point Bitzer questioned whether society truly valued education, and Papert and Stolurow, aghast, were quick to respond:

  BITZER: I don’t think teachers, the parents, or the federal government are nearly as excited about improving education as they have led us to believe.

  PAPERT:…Nevertheless, it might be true that a thing called education is possible, and some of the people believe in it, and it will be installed in the world.

  BITZER: My feeling is this will progress because of interest for other than educational, direct educational purposes. It is by meeting these needs that you will be able to get back to education, which is the reason for all of this. But if we don’t include these needs in some way we just won’t make it, we will just become obsolete. We have to be very careful how we plan to get from where we are today to where we are going.

  STOLUROW: This sounds like a much more radical change in position than I understood you to say before. What you are now saying, if I am reading it correctly, is that the direct instructional purposes of a computer-based educational system is [sic] the least important component of what you see the total mix to achieve this flexibility. And that the other things will carry the instructional component along.

  BITZER: It depends on whose viewpoint you are looking at. If I were the parent buying the terminal, I would be looking at it on another basis. What is it going to do for me? What will it do for my wife, for my family, for my vacation, for my pay, all of these other things? Incidentally, if it happens to teach, that’s great. From my standpoint I happen to think the most important impact it will have is making literacy commonplace in inner-city schools. But I just don’t think that the rest of the world does.

  Another bombshell Bitzer dropped on the audience was his belief that the days of the federal government funding large educational computing systems like PLATO were over. “My opinion is that we will have to count on industry, not the federal government, to support this research.” While that notion sank into the audience there were questions about the inevitably huge costs of Bitzer’s “million-terminal system.”

  Dr. Marty Rockway, the technical director at the time of the Human Resources Lab at Lowry Air Force Base, then asked Bitzer a question, resulting in this extraordinary exchange:

  ROCKWAY: What is the probability that commercial industry will fund a $90-million-plus capitalization of the kind of system you are proposing?

  BITZER: I think it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million to a billion. I think there is an excellent probability, above 50 percent.

  ROCKWAY: Why?

  BITZER: Because I happen to know some things.

  Bitzer’s tease was not the best way to endear himself, or PLATO, to this esteemed audience of colleagues, but he could not help it: it was his way. Perhaps owing to his family’s successful automobile dealership business, there was an entrepreneurial streak in him that made his burning ambition all the more visible at times like this. He was a true believer, a classic technology visionary, and one way or another PLATO was going to be his gift to the world. By 1975 PLATO IV was supposed to have grown to over four thousand terminals—or so he had promised for years going back to the mid-1960s. And yet there it was, the calendar said 1975, the deployment of PLATO IV was largely complete, but only about a thousand terminals were connected to the system. It was a magnificent feat, but it was nowhere near the scale he had boasted about in print and in person. Bitzer, who had not budged from Illinois since enrolling as an undergraduate in 1951, seemed to yearn for business success. Yet he struck people around him as hopelessly naive when it came to business. “He was so completely oblivious,” says one colleague. Bitzer’s optimism, car-salesman’s confidence, and undeniable technical brilliance could charm any doubter, but the fact remained that PLATO IV never grew to anywhere near four thousand terminals. But even that did not faze him: in 1975 he was cooking up a deal with the maker of the CYBER supercomputer that powered PLATO IV, a deal so immense and boldly ambitious that it would take the old four thousand number and toss it right out the window. Four thousand terminals? Child’s play. That was the past. That kind of scale might have seemed like a lot, but not anymore. Bitzer had hitched his reputation on a new goal, a million terminals—maybe more!—and the future of PLATO, and its Orange Glow, looked brighter than ever.

  —

  What Bitzer knew was that CERL and the University of Illinois were deep in talks with Control Data Corporation to license rights to PLATO—even the trademark—to the company so it could market the system commercially. In fact by the time Bitzer gave that “million-terminal” presentation in September 1975 at the HumRRO conference, CDC and UI were way beyond talks. CDC had by then recruited executives to drive the PLATO initiative, who in turn built teams, labs, offices, and even had secured a PLATO system of their own quietly running in a Minneapolis suburb. UI, CDC, and a reluctant National Science Foundation were attempting to pull off one of the largest federally funded technology transfers from academia to industry ever attempted up to that time. “There was no legal precedent,” says Bob Morris, a CDC executive, “or any history of such a large joint research program between a university and a corporation.” Nevertheless, CERL and CDC both believed PLATO represented an enormous opportunity. They just had to convince the university and NSF. CDC was going to make PLATO the most important mission of the company, and most of the company didn’t even know it yet.

  “You know, I just have a terrible feeling,” says Bill Cole, who worked out of CDC’s office in Sunnyvale, California, regarding Don Bitzer’s frequent spouting of the million-terminal vision to anyone who would listen, “that Don might have picked up that number from Control Data.”

  One day back during December 1972, Bill Cole got a call from Bob Morris in Minneapolis.

  “I’ve arranged to borrow you for three months,” Morris told Cole. “Is that okay with you?”

  “Sure, what are we going to do?”

  “Well, it’s hard to explain….Come on up and I’ll tell you right after New Year’s.”

  Cole flew to Minneapolis. Morris told him about a new initiative Control Data was undertaking: the company planned to begin commercially marketing and selling PLATO worldwide. “That’s the first time I ever heard of PLATO,” says Cole. “He either had some documentation or loaned me his, so I spent a day or night or two trying to understand the system.”

  Then he, Bob Morris, and Morris’s boss John Dammeyer went down to CERL for a visit. “We were pleased that they took an interest,” says William Golden. “We thought we were doing things with their machine that nobody else was doing. We were taking every last advantage of what the machine could do and they agreed.”

  The usual dog-and-pony show ensued, the entourage of Bitzer and the Control Data VIPs trotting up and down the various corridors of CERL, stopping in here and there for visits and impromptu demos. Says Cole, “I’m not sure to this day whether it was a Bitzer setup to take us to the attic and have David Frankel knock the socks off these three corporate suits.” Bitzer, who in his spare time pursued a longtime interest in magic tricks, had in fact joined the International Brotherhood of Magicians. In a way his PLATO demos were his biggest magic tricks, and it was his job to knock people’s socks off, or recruit an available CERL staffer to do so.

  Bob Morris had no idea what to expect when he got to CERL. “I have to say I was somewhat overwhelmed by the creativeness in this team of people. And just delighted at the prospect of working with people like this. The lab itself physically was kind of a frumpy place
. Well, it was worse than frumpy. Don Bitzer’s office was in an old radar tower, as was Frank Propst’s. The place was not elegant, but on the other hand the work that was done in there was just unbelievable.”

  It was the first of countless meetings and visits—CDC down to CERL, and CERL up to CDC. At one point David Frankel, the PLATO wunderkind, was asked to fly—the teenage Frankel had a pilot’s license—Cole and another CDC engineering manager up to Chicago so they could attend the Consumer Electronics Show, with an emergency stop at an airfield in Rockford due to the engineering manager’s airsickness in the single-engine plane.

  William C. Norris, CDC’s maverick founder and chief executive, would receive Bitzer and other contingents from CERL into his office—he apparently hated traveling, particularly by airplane—and would never, in the long history of the Control Data/CERL relationship, visit CERL, tour the lab, or set foot on the campus of the University of Illinois.

  Robert M. Price, Norbert Berg, William C. Norris, 1982 Credit 33

  But he was sold on PLATO.

  His attention had been drawn to PLATO in its earliest CSL days, when Alpert’s lab placed an order for the first 1604 computer, resulting in the fracas with IBM in the Illinois statehouse over competing bids, with CDC ultimately prevailing. Harold Brooks, the CDC sales rep for the Illinois territory, had sealed that deal, and then found a way to get CSL a second 1604, a used machine costing all of one dollar, that Bitzer could dedicate to PLATO, freeing up the other machine for CSL’s other pressing projects.

  In the mid-1960s Norris created Control Data Institutes, a network of job-skills training centers around the country, partly motivated by CDC’s own need to hire more qualified workers. Entering the training industry gave him a new perspective on the importance of education in general, a perspective that would continue to grow as he watched Bitzer build up PLATO III and begin work on PLATO IV.