by Brian Dear
“The thing was,” says Hill, “the Terminal Division had been bought from an outside company who made the big terminals that were used for flight control, and they were used to two- and three-year projects. They didn’t have the mechanism for decision, and Bob Morris said, ‘If you get decisions quickly within twenty-four hours, how fast could you develop it?’ And they said, ‘Development is not the problem, it’s the decision making. We come up with problems, we need solutions, and we need fast decisions.’ Bob Morris said, ‘Okay, you got him, here he is.’ And I was thrown in there.”
“When the nine-month period came along,” says Morris, “I was on one of my trips to Moscow, and I was due back three days before the end of the nine months, and when I got back to my office, the prototype was sitting on my desk, working.”
“We had the biggest party at the end of that nine months that you would believe, right?” says Hill. “Up in Roseville we had shrimp until nobody could eat anymore.”
If there is one constant in the eternal march of technological progress, it is change. The terminal Jock Hill produced epitomized the tumultuous change that the PLATO system would undergo in the coming years.
The most dramatic change: gone was the Friendly Orange Glow.
Instead of orange pixels, they were grayish white. The new terminal, called the IST (short for Information Systems Terminal), looked more like an early personal computer. A big, wide, heavy base, with a black grille in front, to which a detached keyboard was connected via a thick cable. On top of the base was a monitor, a special elongated CRT with a square display featuring exactly 512 x 512 black-and-white pixels and, mounted directly over the surface of the CRT’s glass, a reflective, acrylic touch screen with barely visible gold wires crisscrossing across the display. During the nine months of development, the price of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) memory chips had plummeted even further than Hill had anticipated. “According to the really long-haired predictions,” says Hill, “it was going to come down, by six or eight to one, and it came down about ten to one, right when we were doing our development. The result was that we could produce a memory-mapped video terminal, which as far as I know had never been done before, because it was cost-prohibitive. The technology wasn’t complex; it was cost-prohibitive. And suddenly, it no longer was. And we were very happy to be just there at the right time.”
The IST terminal Credit 36
The terminal that Jock Hill designed looked like a terminal to people in 1975. The fact that today we would we look at it and see a PC is not surprising, because it was a personal computer. A stealthy personal computer. “We produced what in effect was a PC,” says Hill, “in 1975.” When one considers the year this machine was developed, and compare it to what else was available at that time, it is suddenly apparent that CDC had just leapfrogged over the entire microcomputer field. Here is Hill describing his machine: “[It had an] 8080 microprocessor, it had plugin cards, it had a separate monitor, with a cable going to the main box, it had a separate keyboard, it had plugin modems, plugin memory, plugin communications, and we even had a plugin disk driver, that wasn’t part of the standard stuff, but we had it networked, so it was revolutionary. And our big problem was producing it at low cost. And we did that. That terminal came in with something like a $1,300 cost, in the first few terminals. And that was beyond everybody’s belief.”
By the time the IST was ready to be sold to consumers, the marketing people had marked up the price to over $8,000, says Hill. It was the beginning of a long line of very bad decisions at CDC. Hill believed the terminal should have been sold for $100 above cost. “If we’d done that, we would have flooded the market because people knew they could use it for other things. It would take loadable programs—we could load programs down from the mainframe into that terminal.”
Jock Hill’s technical skill was to Dammeyer and Morris’s PLATO team what the “Q” character is to James Bond and MI6. Such was Morris’s confidence in Hill that he gave him a little assignment on the side: develop a portable PLATO terminal using a plasma display. Hill prepared some designs, and delivered several fully usable prototypes that were toted around the world for the next several years for demos. They were bulky by today’s standards, but compared to the early laptops coming out in the early 1980s—for example the suitcase-sized Osborne-1 computer—they were right out of a Bond film. Open up the case, and there is a full-sized 512 x 512 orange-glow plasma display, along with keyboard and even an acoustic coupler, phone headset, and modem, for dialing in to PLATO from anywhere in the world. Only a small number were built, and they never became commercial products.
While CDC was preparing the IST, Jack Stifle and his hardware team at CERL were building a new terminal as well. The difference between what CERL came up with and what CDC came up with is striking: CERL’s was called the PLATO V. Gone was the compressed-air-driven microfiche slide projector and the internal mirrors to reflect the image back through the plasma display. With that out of the way, the terminal did not need to be as big, so it was half the depth of the PLATO IV. The sides were smooth, blond wood. The terminal had a Z-80 microprocessor in it, which took on some of the burden of displaying graphics on the screen. In a way it looked like a beautiful piece of furniture compared to the metallic, corporate, Sherman tank that was the IST.
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One aspect of the Dammeyer-Morris PLATO business plan examined potential global market entry points. It was determined that CDC should go after the Soviet Union and several oil-rich countries around the world: places like Iran and Venezuela—places that pulled in considerable oil money, but lacked the educational infrastructure found in the U.S. CDC believed such governments would be willing to invest considerable amounts to improve education for their citizens.
Bitzer had already begun demonstrating PLATO internationally, including at a CAI conference in Bari, Italy, in 1972. In late 1973, a group including Bitzer, Tenczar, Jack Stifle, and Peter Maggs (Bruce Maggs’s law-professor father, who spoke fluent Russian) took a handful of PLATO IV terminals—with the keyboards modified to use Cyrillic keycaps—to the Soviet Union, connected them up over a seemingly impossible patchwork of phone lines all the way back to Champaign-Urbana, and demoed PLATO at an educational conference at the exhibition center at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. It marked the beginning of a set of major trips around the world throughout the 1970s to demonstrate PLATO in other countries, and had the blessing and support of Control Data, which had already begun attempting to open trade with the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War.
Often the dial-up connection would fail. At one point, in what might be an apocryphal story, someone on the CERL team tested the phone lines and heard breathing on the lines. (The KGB was allegedly listening.) “We think they were recording everything that was going on,” says Jack Stifle. “Once in a while there’d be clicks and there’d be noise, and things would go bonkers for a second or two, and we’d jokingly say ‘Well, they must be changing tapes on the machine.’ ”
Bitzer has a reputation as a teetotaler, which made life in Moscow a bit difficult, as the CERL group discovered that Russians like to drink vodka. Seemingly all the time. Bitzer wasn’t the only CERL staffer not interested in vodka, so elaborate steps were taken to surreptitiously replace the vodka in their glasses with water during the incessant toasting and clinking of glasses by the various Russian dignitaries welcoming the Americans.
Paul Tenczar recalls that the entire group from CERL had to be briefed by a U.S. government agent—one of the three-letter agencies, he couldn’t remember which—before traveling to Moscow. “Somebody came through and talked to us all a little bit,” he says. “We were to be fully open or whatever, but the one thing that we were not to mention absolutely—I mean under dire coming-back-and-thrown-in-the-slammer or something—to mention that you could monitor terminals, that a PLATO terminal could monitor another PLATO terminal. All of us were instructed by some agent.” After extensive setup at the conference hall, the event
finally opened, and attendees poured into the exhibition hall. “Within the first hour of the show being open,” Tenczar says, “some guy came up to me, and he spoke pretty good English, starts talking to me, and the first thing he asks me was, ‘Well, can one terminal monitor another terminal?’ ”
Later during the conference, Tenczar was approached again at the exhibit booth by someone who seemed to be recruiting him on the spot. “Some young fellow comes up to me and says…scientists are treated royally in Russia and, you know, if I would think of living there they could really arrange nice stuff, you know, women, and get me to academic centers and stuff like that. They thought I was somebody or other, and I said, ‘Well, I kind of like Chicago’ and of course he’s never lived in Chicago and I said, ‘Well I kind of like the skyscrapers there,’ and he kind of smiled and walked off.”
During the CERL group’s time at the conference, which happened in late November 1973, the CERL staffers would occasionally check pnotes and notesfiles to see what was going on back home. One thing that was going on was the discovery of the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, announced in a Senate committee on November 21. News from the West was blacked out in the Soviet Union, but PLATO managed to get the news past the Iron Curtain.
Other trips would follow. In 1974, a larger exhibition of PLATO was brought back to Moscow, this time led by a contingent of CDC people, including Bob Morris, Michael Allen, and Jock Hill. Larger meetings were held with more Soviet counterparts, along with a stream of demonstrations of PLATO, including special lessons that had been developed in the Russian language (complete with a special Cyrillic character set). Among the dignitaries that stopped by for a demonstration was Boris Yeltsin, his hair not yet fully white.
Mort Frishberg demonstrating PLATO to Boris Yeltsin, Moscow, 1974 Credit 37
One day during this time, Patrick Stubbs, a CDC employee back in Minneapolis, was working at his PLATO terminal when he suddenly got the familiar beeping call and message flashing at the very bottom of his screen saying someone wanted to TERM-talk him. It was Mort Frishberg. “I’m thinking, where’s Mort, I didn’t know where he was, I had no idea,” says Stubbs. The TERM-talk went something like this:
FRISHBERG: Hi Pat how are you doing?
STUBBS: fine
FRISHBERG: I’m doing a demo
STUBBS: oh good
FRISHBERG: What did you have for lunch today?
“I’m going, why the—you know—it took me by surprise, not the kind of question you usually get,” says Stubbs.
STUBBS: Uh, I had a ham sandwich and an apple
FRISHBERG: OK good thanks goodbye
“I’m like, what?” asks Stubbs. “What was that all about? The next time I saw him I said, ‘What was going on?’ ‘When I was in Moscow I was doing a PLATO demonstration, and they wanted to make sure that you weren’t a canned program on the other side. They said, ‘Ask him what he had for lunch,’ so I said, ‘Ham sandwich and an apple,’ they said, ‘Oh okay.’ ”
Peter Maggs, Michael Allen, and Jock Hill, Moscow, 1974 Credit 38
CDC was determined to open up business in Russia. The U.S. government was not so keen, pointing out that to deliver a fully outfitted PLATO system to Russia meant delivering a CYBER supercomputer, disk drives, peripheral processing units, printers, terminals, telecommunications equipment, and of course a massive amount of proprietary software. CYBERs were used by the U.S. government in any number of agencies, many of which were secretive not only about their using the machines, but even mentioning the agencies’ existence. Nevertheless, CDC persisted, continuing talks and PLATO demos for several more years.
Another of CDC’s major foreign trade hopes was establishing PLATO in Iran. The company managed to open a Control Data Institute and some data processing business after receiving permission from the Shah’s government. In May 1975, a group from CERL including Bruce Sherwood, Jack Stifle, and Peter Maggs, along with a CDC team that included John Dammeyer, brought PLATO terminals to Tehran for a series of demos. Numerous government officials including various top-level ministers were brought in and shown the system. The Iranians hosted the Americans as guests at a fancy dinner in a magnificently decorated ballroom, and in the center of each elaborate place-setting on the tables were Coca-Cola bottles placed in their honor. (At least, they looked like bottles of Coca-Cola. To their horror they discovered that the substance inside was largely sickly sweet, thick Coke syrup, sans the carbonation.) Efforts were made to demo PLATO to the Shah himself, but allegedly due to security concerns he never showed up. His son, Reza Pahlavi, a fourteen-year-old at the time, was also invited to receive a demo. The team was kept in the dark again at the request of security, until one day they were instructed to set up at a distant location. Reza and his entourage did finally arrive, surrounded by armed guards. He loved PLATO, especially the games. Back at the palace, he raved about the PLATO system, including to a family friend who happened to be visiting: the recently deposed King Constantine of Greece, aged thirty-three. Reza’s praise of PLATO made such an impression on the king, he inquired if he too could get a demo of this wondrous American computer named after the famous Greek scholar. Constantine got his demo.
CERL and CDC created Persian-language support in PLATO as part of the demos, and eventually the Shah’s government agreed to a deal. However, it required that the IST terminals had to be made in Iran (or at least have a decal with “Control Data of Iran” and Persian script on it affixed to the screen bezel). In the end, the Ayatollah Khomeni and the Iranian revolution ended CDC’s hopes in that country. Several of the government ministers, including Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who had attended the demos back in 1975, were executed. CDC personnel had to evacuate the country, and the company lost a lot of money. A number of the Iranian ISTs wound up at other PLATO sites, including the University of Delaware, where, amid campus rallies outside during the American hostage crisis, students inside pried off the “Control Data of Iran” metal labels in protest.
Iranian IST terminal Credit 39
CDC marketed PLATO in Venezuela, another oil-rich country that Dammeyer and Morris had identified in their original plan. Happily for CDC, at one point a minister-level Venezuelan government official became very interested. “He heard about PLATO,” says Bob Morris, “got all excited about it, wanted to come to the U.S. and visit us at Control Data and also visit CERL. Since this guy was at a ministerial level we felt we had to treat him right and all that stuff. He was a very hot prospect.” The government minister was considering buying two PLATO systems and quite a large number of PLATO terminals, says Morris. “I went out and rented a Learjet, and he visited Control Data and he went through an executive symposium…and then we put him into the Learjet and he and I went down to the University of Illinois, to CERL, visited Don Bitzer and his team, and he saw the whole magilla there, and got back in the Learjet, back to Chicago, where he caught a plane and went home to Venezuela.”
The next day Morris got a call from the top CDC person in Venezuela saying the minister wanted to buy those two PLATO systems and wanted Morris to come down and visit and bring a team of people. They attempted to make hotel reservations but found everything booked. When the minister heard of their difficulty finding lodging, he booked the presidential suite at the swanky Tamanaco Hotel. Morris describes it as an “obscene suite, with five bedrooms and a huge terrace and kitchens and living rooms and dining rooms and waiters all over the place and so on.” Through CDC’s contacts, they scheduled meetings with the minister. “We would show up,” says Morris, “and he would not be there. This went on for a week. We were quite naive. Didn’t know why this was happening. Finally, we found out through our contacts that what he was looking for was some sort of a payoff or a bribe to his relatives, and then based on that he would buy the systems off of government money. Control Data had a very strict policy on that, and we wouldn’t do that. And so we wound up meeting with him for a couple brief meetings while we were down there, we
spent two weeks down there, and came back with nothing. Well, in the meantime, this guy had gone public that he was going to buy these PLATO systems. He had exposed himself to the world, and an election was coming up, and as it turns out he had gotten the population of the country all juiced up about bringing in all this high-technology stuff and advancing the country and so on, and if I recall he didn’t get reelected and someone else got reelected. There was a great deal of pressure on this someone else to make good on the promises that he had made, and eventually, I think as much as two years later, they did buy two PLATO systems.”
Mike Smith was one of the regional CDC managers for foreign countries, including Iran, where he lived and worked for CDC for four years in Tehran until the revolution ended CDC’s presence there, and then Venezuela, which he describes as “a can of worms.”
“Venezuela was more corrupt than Iran, if that was possible….In South America, the Venezuelans were known as the ‘Iranians of South America’ and not just for their oil reserves. You could get anything you wanted in Caracas—anything. Like many CDC international offices, CDCVEN [the acronym CDC used for its Venezuelan business] had its own guy specializing in local bribery and ours was good.” This was CDC’s fixer for Venezuela, “used for more local practical bribery associated with licenses, permits, getting employees and families out of scrapes, etc.”
Smith describes two versions of the CDC/PLATO/Venezuela story: one version the company used for public consumption, and one was his own theory. The public one, he says, involved the Communist Party in Venezuela, which “became convinced it made them considerable political hay if they opposed the ‘brainwashing-Wall-Street-running-dogs’ PLATO system which would be certain to destroy the Venezuelan culture and rot the minds of the future hope of the country,” he says. His own theory is that there was a certain Venezuelan individual who “could not tear off a piece of the action big enough to satisfy his greed,” says Smith. “He crouched in the middle of a nasty web of influence, bribery, backstabbing, manipulation, greed, and certain malfeasance.” Smith believes this individual colluded with a certain city manager to extract money from CDC to line their own pockets. “My short version,” Smith once explained in an email, “is the PLATO buy became entangled in Venezuelan politics and did not survive the massive political infighting and jockeying for a bite out of it for all concerned (including two or more of our own guys). I do not believe we lost it because we did not bribe. True there was a corporate public effort to clean up our act (I have seen CDC bribe all over the world—even in places like Germany, supposed to be un-bribable) but HQ never backed off of doing business along those lines (anyway it was very difficult to stop the local CDC folks from making deals HQ did not know about). In a lot of countries it was the only way to do business. When the U.S. government started with pressure on U.S. companies to not bribe they started our downfall in the business world….Anyway CDC had the right guys in CDCVEN to handle it….For some reason PLATO never got its due anywhere.”
