by Brian Dear
The loss of John Dammeyer’s leadership, and the passing over of Bob Morris to replace him, changed the destiny of PLATO within Control Data. “Bob Morris didn’t have as much control over Bob Linsenman as he needed,” says Jock Hill. “And I think that was one of the problems. John Dammeyer did, but Bob Linsenman and Bob Morris never quite melded in the same way. John Dammeyer was a very powerful person.”
Dammeyer’s aneurysm came not long before CDC went to New York to unveil PLATO to the media and announce its bet-the-company CBE strategy. Without Dammeyer, PLATO became more vulnerable. Says Hill, “The wolves came out, and they—everybody—they leapt all over it.”
Eventually CDC did get a PLATO sale with Russia. As far as a U.S. business like CDC was concerned, Russian rubles were worthless outside the Soviet Union, so the plan was for CDC to trade CYBERs for shiploads of vodka and other valuables. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and all bets were off. “All of a sudden,” says Bob Morris, “the State Department and the CIA just kind of clamped down on any kind of deals with the Soviet Union.” CDC’s hopes for a computer-based education joint venture with Russia, something Morris believes would have been valued at $80 million, were over.
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In April 1976, William Norris presided over a CDC press conference at the Park Lane Hotel in New York City where he and Bob Morris took turns describing to the media the PLATO system and the company’s computer-based education mission. “At this conference,” Morris wrote in a memo afterward, “John Sheehan, Chairman and Chief Executive of Commercial Credit Corporation, announced his company’s intention to build a nationwide network of learning centers offering PLATO educational services. Together, CERL, Control Data, Commercial Credit, and with the contribution of hundreds of content authors, created a revolution in computer-based education, information handling, and communications.”
A handwritten 1980 internal memo in William Norris’s archives provides a glimpse into the reaction employees across CDC had to this new and growing PLATO project. “There was very significant resistance inside CDC to PLATO,” the document says, “starting with lower executive management’s resentment to the short-term, negative effects which PLATO made on profits. Other well-intended attitudes developed, leading to severe jurisdictional pressures.”
Morris viewed the unveiling to the public as having a salutary effect on damping down the internal resentment: “The organizations inside the company who were not involved with PLATO kind of viewed it as an R&D program that was very exciting and all that stuff, but they weren’t sure that it was ever going to be an integral part of Control Data’s business. It became very clear as a result of that announcement that it was a key strategic program for Control Data….It was a very important event, because it was a point where Control Data made it known to the world that it was very serious about PLATO and computer-based education and totally committed to it, that it was an integral part of Control Data’s business where, prior to that, it was always viewed as a research and development plan that Control Data was playing with….PLATO is a funny thing. You can’t talk about it and get people excited about it. You really have to see it, to feel it, to touch it. Some of those reporters and people like that who had heard a lot about it heard the name for years and years and years, actually got a chance to see it in action. To them it was mind-boggling. There was just a lot of acceptance.”
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Bitzer seemed to be on a plane constantly, PLATO terminal in tow, during this era, demoing PLATO to the four corners of the world. In 1976, hosted by Control Data Australia, he demoed from one end of that country to the other, including a live demo in Perth that was aired on national television. It was his usual demo, and included a few notable quips about the state of education, such as: “The elementary school system…turns out to be one of man’s most inventive forms of inexpensive babysitting. In spite of how we complain about the price.”
In October 1977, he and a group from CERL and CDC, as well as many of the usual suspects from the world of educational computing—Suppes, Papert, John Volk (for TICCIT), and Arthur Melmed from the National Science Foundation—were invited to testify before a House science and technology subcommittee on “Computers and the Learning Society.” In addition, William C. Norris testified with a prepared statement titled “The Future of PLATO Computer Based Education.” “It should be noted,” he said at the outset, “that one of this nation’s and the world’s most urgent needs is better education. When one considers that three-quarters of a billion people in the world are illiterate and that illiteracy is rising, it might be the number one need.” He continued,
Control Data’s top strategic priority is to apply computer technology to help achieve quality, equality, and productivity improvements in education. It has the largest single commitment of developmental resources in our company today. And that’s how it should be. It is our conviction that if society’s major problems are given priority, in the long run they will provide the best opportunities for business.
He ended saying that the PLATO computer-based education system was available already: “It is cost-effective now in many areas. Expansion into virtually all areas of education will happen, it will relieve the plight of inner-city and remote rural schools, it will move into the home, it will reverse the tide of illiteracy in the world. The principal uncertainty is the time required to achieve these objectives. It can be greatly shortened if the federal government will provide funding now for schools and universities to pilot CBE.”
In case there was any lingering doubt, Norris had by 1977 made it crystal clear to everyone inside and outside CDC: he was betting his company on PLATO.
23
The Whim of Iron
When John Dammeyer and Bob Morris delivered their business plan to Norris and his executive committee in 1974, it already hinted at things that Bitzer would expand on in his 1975 “million-terminal” speech: very large-scale PLATO was not just about education. It couldn’t be if it wanted to survive. Bitzer believed that PLATO had to have other uses in business and at home. It essentially needed to be an online service, more akin to what CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy would become in another fifteen years. Education was a “feature” amid a conglomeration of services, some of which were useful for businesses, some of which might even be recreational. Dammeyer and Morris understood the educational vision of PLATO, but recognized too how the system had become what every Silicon Valley company today likes to say they’ve built: a platform, not just a product. PLATO in the mid-1970s was perhaps the most advanced online services platform in the world at the time, not just for the creation and delivery of education, but also for tools that enabled communication, collaboration, and also recreation. Consider the list of such tools had emerged on the system in just a few years: PLATO Notes, the Notesfile Sequencer, Personal Notes, inter-system notesfiles, inter-system Personal Notes, TERM-talk, TERM-consult, TERM-comment, Monitor Mode, and Talkomatic. Imagine what could be done if CDC spent some real money improving and expanding on those tools, many of which had been written by teenagers for next to nothing? Imagine if the TUTOR language were expanded, and perhaps other programming languages were added, and PLATO were given far more powerful database and search capabilities? What could the world do with PLATO then?
“Bill Norris was a great supporter of mine,” Bob Morris told this author in a 1997 interview. “I’m a great supporter of his. To me, he was a very good personal friend and kind of like a father, in a way. In all the time we were doing this, I can think of only one area where Bill Norris and I disagreed, and it’s still an area that we disagree. And that was, because of the cost of PLATO, and because we knew that with economy of scale, and getting more of it out in the market, we could continually reduce its cost, I had proposed that we start selling PLATO for business applications, for commercial applications. It was a system that would do things like airline reservations very well. It could do loan processing very well, any place where you had real-time transaction processing, PLATO
was a system that had the underlying technology in order to be able to do these applications. And if we had sold PLATO as much in the commercial environment, as we were trying to in the educational environment, then we would increase these sales, we would increase the volume of production, we would increase the number of terminals on our systems and services, and that would help get the price down, and that would help make it more viable in education.”
This helps explain why the IST terminal was not simply a cheaper-to-manufacture version of UI’s PLATO IV. It was not even a terminal, but a fully fledged personal computer that could also act as a terminal. It had the hardware in it. It was expandable. It was built with the future in mind. Jock Hill knew exactly what he was doing. In essence, all it needed was a compelling set of software to make it incredibly easy to use online—or offline. In business, at home, and in education.
One may speculate that part of Norris’s difficulty embracing the business and communication/collaboration side of PLATO was that he had been “imprinted” on the original vision of PLATO, going all the way back to PLATO II and III when CSL bought its first 1604. This was a good decade before the new wave of kids came along in the early 1970s, turning PLATO into something that was never part of the overall vision, but then suddenly was too good not to include in the vision going forward. Had Norris traveled down to UI and spent a few days at CERL he might have developed an appreciation for this more expansive view of what PLATO had become.
Morris tried to explain to Norris the benefits of pursuing business and education markets at the same time—charging more to business customers so they could charge less to education customers—but Norris did not see it this way.
“Norris logically could see it that way,” said Morris. “But his concern was, ‘I’m doing this because I want to make a social impact on education. And if you guys go and turn your attention to selling in the business environment, you’re going to start forgetting about education, and start forgetting about our end goal. I want you to concentrate on education. Okay?’ And so based on that, we did concentrate on education, I still think today if we had sold into the business environment we would have been able to fund more of the stuff that was getting the price down and achieving the educational objectives that we were out to achieve.”
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When Norris set his mind to something and made a decision, however large or small, that was it. His word was law, his decisions etched into stone. Countless former CDC employees describe Norris’s decisions and directions with the same word: edicts.
Norris was also the type of CEO with a ruthless memory that brought fear and awe to those who worked for him. “There was a man who listened,” says Jock Hill. “He asked very, very meaningful questions, took a decision, and it stuck. And when he met you in the elevator, a week later, he was the sort of person who—or two weeks later—he’d say, ‘Hi Jock. How are you getting along with that project now?’ and he’d listen to the answer. Now, when you get a guy who’s as high up as Bill Norris, taking that detailed a look at—I mean I was relatively junior, I was five, six, seven layers down below Bill—but, he knew what I was doing, and when he saw me in the street, he recognized me. That was nice. When the decision came that we had to either use plasma or CMOS memory with a CRT, I remember going to Bob Morris and saying, ‘I’m being pressured by the outside organizations to use plasma, because that’s all they ever used’ and I said, ‘It’s not a good decision,’ and Bob Morris asked me why, and what reasoning I had behind it, and how I could support it, and he went to Bill Norris with that decision, and Bill Norris supported me, 100 percent, and I was very, very pleased. I’ve spoken about this many times to other people, that you get such good support from a high-level guy. He kept his eye on what was going on.”
One day, Norris had an idea. “He had expressed a desire to be able to solve problems of degrading urban environments and that sort of thing,” says Morris, “and how does he get the professionals back into the urban areas, and I had told him about a concept a number of years earlier called ‘research campuses,’ where you would build a campuslike structure and have a bunch of central services like computer centers and so on….We talked about that a little bit, and he said, ‘Hey, why don’t you just write me a short description of that,’ and I was going off on vacation on the Bahamas, and I sat down there on the beach and wrote a ten-page white paper, describing these research campus concepts. And when I got back to the office, and I gave him a copy of it, he took it home over the weekend and read it, and then called me back up to his office and said, ‘Bob, I want to do this,’ and ‘Give me an estimate of what it would take to put together ten to fifteen of these centers across the U.S.,’ and the total came to about $150 million. And he took it to the executive committee and the board of directors, and then he asked me to come and make a presentation to the executive committee and the board of directors, to allocate $150 million to this idea. And he said, ‘Bob, I want you to do this, I want you to run it.’ And he was pretty serious about it. I told him I didn’t want to, I wanted to stay with PLATO. He said, ‘I’m investing $150 million in your idea, I really need you.’ And what could I say?”
Morris and Dammeyer were the only two high-level managers assigned to PLATO who had been there since the beginning, spending a great amount of face time at CERL, getting to know the players there, getting to know the technology, the courseware, the vision, the dream. A dream they fully believed in. “When we started this,” says Morris, “we were kind of autonomous, and there was little visibility. We, John Dammeyer and I, ran this thing the way we wanted to, very little interference from the outside. The more it became visible—that in Bill Norris’s mind this was the most important thing happening in Control Data—all of a sudden there were two reactions: one was negative in the sense of ‘Why are they getting all the attention and we’re not,’ and the other was ‘This is Norris’s pet project, I better get involved in it.’ ”
In 1977, Norris issued an edict to create the Control Data Education Company. He named John Lacey, who had been an executive vice president, to be president of this new subsidiary. “Bill Norris was adamant,” says Lacey, “I really had to shepherd [PLATO] through Control Data. There was more opposition among employees in Control Data than there were positive attitudes about it.”
Bob Linsenman described the culture as “snakes and mongooses. It was phenomenal. PLATO being such a critical part of Norris’s thinking, and such a central part of his attention, it was a very political part of the company to be in. People were moved in and moved out I think sometimes on a whim. Some people considered being assigned to the education division as punishment….Like being a point man in Vietnam. There was so much hope, so many dreams, from the boss, the pressure was sometimes unbearable.”
“There were all kinds of power plays to get involved in it,” says Morris, “to be a part of it, to trying to get the visibility and that sort of thing….What they did was, in order to make this look like a fairly massive thing they took everybody in the company that had anything to do with education, and made them part of this company. Now, for some people, who were craving the high-visibility thing, and that sort of thing, that was great, that was the best thing that could ever happen to them. For other people, it appeared as you don’t have anything to do so we’ll put you in this organization. And to some extent some of them viewed that as punishment. And one of the problems was that when this company was formed, I think the total number of employees was around six hundred people, and within that six hundred people there were something like seventy executives. Of course, seventy executives managing six hundred people doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. All of a sudden there are a lot of power plays and committees and committees on top of committees, and bureaucracy, and so on. It was a hard time to work through.”
Dammeyer was gone, and now Morris was being pulled out of a project he loved. But Jock Hill believes that there were other forces at work to yank Morris out of PLATO. “Bob was forced out of a po
sition of power where he was most useful,” says Hill.
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Another of Norris’s edicts was that all management training in the company had to be taught through PLATO. Every manager at any level had to go through a minimum of forty hours per year of PLATO lessons. In Silicon Valley, this practice is affectionately called “eating your own dog food,” and was generally considered a good thing. If the company that makes a product doesn’t use it themselves, why should anyone else? Not only that, but how can managers tell their teams what to do if they themselves are not familiar with the product?
Steve Adkins, who had joined CDC in 1961 and stayed through to the bitter end, remembers the switchover from classroom training to PLATO. One consequence of the switch was, says Adkins, that “one lost the benefit of classroom training—meeting other new managers and sharing experiences. But the courses were outstanding, using the full animation capabilities of the PLATO terminal. Each course included a nice course workbook. I liked taking the PLATO courses. I would reserve a block of time in the PLATO Learning Center after hours to complete several modules in a short time at my convenience.” One thing he learned using PLATO’s courses had nothing to do with the subject matter of the courses. He realized some of the other employees had figured out how to cheat. “You immediately take the final test for each learning module,” he says, “by racing through the test guessing at the answers. You keep taking the final test until you have discovered enough correct answers to pass. I never did this….I like to learn.”
Perhaps one problem with the way Control Data ate its own dog food was that they ate the wrong dog food, or they didn’t eat different varieties of dog food. It’s perfectly fine to assign managers companywide PLATO for in-house training and personal development, but this was essentially exposing many CDC personnel only to the “student” side of PLATO, rather than the “author” side, where—ignoring the TUTOR coding for a moment—all the communication and collaboration tools (and games) existed. Such tools were widely used among the rank and file in the Education Company, but outside of that, usage dropped off considerably.
