by Brian Dear
Meanwhile, CERL’s business office, which managed all of the accounting for the many local and remote sites that leased equipment and subscribed to CERL’s PLATO services, had become a disorganized nightmare, and the person who ran it was dismissed. The business office reported to Frank Propst, the associate director of CERL, who then hired a new person to run it named Barbara Montgomery. Propst, married at the time, began a relationship with Montgomery, which led to him divorcing his wife and marrying Montgomery.
One Saturday morning Bitzer called Propst over to his house to discuss the idea of commercializing PLATO, now that it was generally agreed that CDC was failing to successfully accomplish that mission. Bitzer had also invited Dave Koffsky, an executive of University Patents, Inc. (UPI), a company that administered UI’s patents. After being presented with the idea and the plans, Propst says he expressed great concerns about conflicts of interest, deeming them so complex and intertwined as to be irresolvable, due to UPI’s complicated financial relationship with the university and with Bitzer and CERL. Propst claims that Bitzer clammed up from that point onward. “I was kind of out of the loop from then on,” Propst says. “But during that time, Bitzer and UPI did in fact form this corporation, UCI.” UPI managed to raise $2.65 million in venture funding for UCI.
Propst began quietly complaining and making negative comments behind Bitzer’s back about his concerns around the growing conflicts and possible improprieties relating to Bitzer, UCI, and Compu-Sat. He also raised a red flag about how the arrangements were being set up with UCI vis-à-vis the CERL staff—particularly the disbursement of UCI stock, which he felt was being unfairly distributed, with some people receiving grants far in excess of their level of contribution to the PLATO effort over the years. “I kept telling them there is a terrifically difficult conflict of interest situation here,” Propst says. Dillon Mapother, a longtime UI professor of physics who had become associate vice chancellor of research during the 1980s, became a sort of intermediary between Propst’s concerns, Bitzer’s efforts to get UCI up and running, and the university’s own interests. “Bitzer concluded that the CDC effort was not going to be the grand launching of PLATO that many people thought it would be,” says Mapother. “Bitzer’s feeling was that the CDC people just hadn’t done it right, and if it were really done right, [he] could achieve all the recognition, acceptance, and so forth, that they had hoped. So, I mean basically Bitzer said, what we want to do—and this became almost a fanatical thing with him—he wanted a chance to start a business that would demonstrate the merits of PLATO. Bitzer was really quite naive as a business person, and he spent the better part of, I think about two years, going around knocking on doors, giving presentations to American venture capital groups.”
“I was caught in this situation,” says Propst, “where I knew that the future of the laboratory was at stake because it was going to go broke, it was going to go deeply, deeply into debt, at this same time I was caught in this position of having to worry about the efficacy of the financial operation of the laboratory, and in addition to that, the issue of the relationship between the University of Illinois and this company that they were licensing, which was, in my mind—the agreements were insane….After the damned agreements were executed, Dillon Mapother sent me a copy of them and said, ‘Would you give me your comments on these?’ ”
Propst wrote a long memo identifying what he felt were all the problems in the agreements. “I took that memo down to Don,” he says, “and I said, ‘Look, Don, I’ve been asked to write this, and it’s not real good, and I’ll simply write him a note and say I’m too busy to respond, if you want me to. Or, if you want me to, I’ll just go and send this memo through.’ And Don looked at it and said, ‘Well, I won’t tell you not to send it, but I think you’re crazy.’ So I went ahead and sent the thing, and then it just kind of went downhill from there.”
The decades-long relationship between Bitzer and Propst was by this point all but finished. At the same time, many in CERL were avoiding both Frank and Barbara Propst. In interviews years later, many former CERL staffers described how they saw the famed ebullient culture of the lab becoming a toxic workplace of suspicion, innuendo, and gossip. Learning of Propst’s memo, Judith Liebman, a newly hired vice chancellor for research, got involved and wanted to know what was going on. She requested Bitzer to come meet with her in January 1987. A later court document described what happened: “Bitzer complained to Liebman about difficulties he was experiencing in working with the Propsts. Bitzer told Liebman that the mistrust between himself and Franklin seemed unremediable [sic], and that he doubted the three could continue working together effectively. In response, Liebman suggested that Bitzer consider removing the Propsts from their positions. In late January or early February 1987, however, Liebman, vice chancellor for academic affairs Robert Berdahl, and then-Chancellor Thomas Everhart decided that it would be inadvisable to transfer the Propsts without first investigating their allegations.” According to Propst, Bitzer came into Propst’s office a week later, informing him that he was being let go, but could not or would not explain why. Then the university engaged the services of a Chicago auditing firm to audit CERL’s books. “We launched an audit,” says Berdahl. “Propst alleged some irregularities in the operation of CERL by Bitzer. Claiming essentially that Bitzer was using the resources of CERL including financial resources to build his own private investment, his own private company, UCI, and this was misappropriating resources from CERL. That was a very serious accusation and as a consequence we ordered an audit….[The auditor] was used to investigating criminality, basically, and he decided to treat this that way, and so he was not very disclosive [sic] of what he was investigating. So Bitzer knew there was an audit going on, but Bitzer had not really [been] informed of the allegations that had been made.”
The audit finally was completed in October 1987, but by then Bitzer had begun drafting letters of resignation and had in fact threatened to resign at least three times. Berdahl was not fond of the auditor. “I found him to be very unpleasant and a person that I had absolutely no confidence in at all,” he says. “And [I] actually asked that he be replaced as auditor at one point. He was treating a very distinguished faculty member as if he was a common thief. So it was rather interesting. We lost Bitzer largely as a result of some of that.”
“After causing considerable disruption at CERL,” one court document says, “the audit ultimately absolved Bitzer of any wrongdoing. Believing that the laboratory could not continue to function with the disharmony that had been produced, the administrators removed the Propsts from their posts at CERL in late November 1987. Barbara Propst was assigned to the position of assistant dean in the College of Applied Life Sciences, and Franklin Propst was returned to his previous position as a tenured professor of physics. Neither transfer resulted in any loss of compensation or rank, and both Barbara and Franklin received their scheduled salary increases for the 1987–88 academic year.”
Frank Propst filed a federal lawsuit on November 25, 1987, claiming that he had been transferred in retaliation for what he believed were valid whistleblowing accusations regarding Bitzer, and that such retaliation amounted to a First Amendment violation. Barbara Propst subsequently filed her own similar suit. Thus began a period of great distraction and disruption at CERL and in the halls of the university administration, going on for the next several years. Numerous UI officials and CERL staffers were deposed. Rumors flew of alleged wiretapping of a CERL staffer’s phone. At one point the Propst camp was given court orders to reveal the notes made by his psychotherapist. The lawyers on both sides dug in, and the fight dragged on.
—
Meanwhile, Control Data was collapsing. Revenue plummeted. Employees were let go by the tens of thousands. Parts of the company were sold off. And then in July 1989, it was announced that Control Data was selling PLATO. One piece—including the “PLATO” trademark—would go to an outfit called the Roach Organization, which would focus on K–12 school markets,
ultimately delivering PLATO courseware on networks of microcomputers. Another piece eventually went to University Online (UOL), which would continue to run aging CYBER computers and deliver university-level PLATO (now called CYBIS) courseware. UOL would later rename itself VCampus. Another piece was sold to Drake Training and Testing, a firm that would continue the work of delivering certification testing of NASD brokers—what had been one of CDC’s few lucrative PLATO businesses for years.
The luxury of hindsight makes it easy to look back on CDC’s long saga to establish a lasting, sustainable business out of PLATO and wonder how they could have messed up so badly. Dave Woolley believes that CDC had a chance to transform PLATO into a huge online service for consumers. The very thing Bitzer spoke of back in 1975, a service that was not just about education, but would include commercial services, games, online community, and collaboration tools—whatever consumers might find worthwhile—all things that would help subsidize the educational dimension of the service. “I’ve often thought that if the upper management had a better understanding of what PLATO was, they had everything they needed to become Lotus and America Online and Macromedia all rolled into one. And they blew it, they didn’t become any of those things. They went down the toilet. They had no concept of the value of the communication features of PLATO. Of course, the people working on the front lines, you know, the low-level grunts, understood really well how valuable it was, I mean, we used it, we used the notesfiles intensively to coordinate our own work. But, I think as far as the middle management was concerned, the notesfiles were just simply something that distracted their employees from doing meaningful work. And they were something to be squashed if at all possible, and certainly not anything of any value that you might consider developing into a product and make money off of it. I don’t think that concept ever even entered any of their minds.”
—
Soon, Bitzer carried out his threats, first taking a leave of absence, and then formally resigning. He had received an outstanding offer from North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, North Carolina, a state newly flush with money as businesses and banks were transforming the “Research Triangle” region into a Silicon Valley of the East, and he took it. The lawsuit, plus what he believes was unfair and nasty treatment by the University of Illinois, finally took its toll. A memo to the PLATO and NovaNET community was posted in =pbnotes= on August 11, 1989 (not even a month after Control Data announced it had sold off PLATO):
On November 17, 1989, I will retire from the University of Illinois. As many of you are aware, I have been at the University of Illinois since 1951 when I came here as an undergraduate student in electrical engineering. After retiring from the University of Illinois, I will assume a position as a Distinguished University Research Professor at North Carolina State University during the academic year. This unique position will allow me to continue to pursue research in a variety of areas including communications and computer graphics. Since this position is for the academic year, North Carolina State University has made it possible for me to spend the summer months at CERL. I look forward to my continued relationship with CERL, and working with its wonderful staff as they move forward into the 1990s. I am pleased that the new CERL NovaNET system is near completion and that it is already delivering education to many sites. Although much work is yet to be done, I am confident that the staff at CERL will continue to expand the NovaNET system and to be leaders in the educational research it makes possible. I personally hope to help contribute in improving the NovaNET system in the future.
Donald L. Bitzer
Suddenly there was a void left by Bitzer’s departure, and, just as Jock Hill had described what happened when John Dammeyer had to step down from leading the PLATO effort at CDC in 1975, the wolves came out. While CERL was faced with finding a new director, forces within the university administration were circling with other plans in mind, including shutting down the laboratory altogether. The UCI/NovaNET controversy, the audit fiasco, and Bitzer’s ultimate departure caused the university to rethink CERL’s continued existence.
“To the extent that CERL was so much an extension of Bitzer’s own ideas and energy and personality, probably his leaving led to some extent to the need to review whether or not CERL should remain a part of the university,” says Berdahl. “The other thing that was going on of course was that we were going through some very serious budget reduction at the university. People in the university, particularly in the college of engineering, felt that CERL was getting very substantial subsidies from the university….There were many who believed that the technology, the mainframe technology, with a specially designed computer [the Zephyr] at that point was an outdated technology and one that would be overtaken quickly…and that to continue to invest in that technology was shortsighted on the part of the university. And so there was a lot of pressure from the computer and engineering sector of the university to begin to withdraw that university subsidy and force CERL to sort of exist on either the revenues that it could generate through research contracts or the revenue it could generate through the UCI revenue stream.”
Bitzer’s decades-old vision for PLATO had had a long, productive, profitable run. But like so many technology visions—and stubborn technology visionaries—the world eventually moves on, and people conjure up new visions. The centralized vision of PLATO was overtaken by the new world of microcomputers and networks. Berdahl believes that CERL was caught up in a great technological divide between centralized computing and the new networked microcomputer movement, and that the lab was on the wrong side of the divide. “I think that what happened in that process,” he says, “is that all of the CERL technology was considered to be obsolete.”
CERL was assigned a series of acting directors, including Ned Goldwasser, a physicist famed for his work at Fermilab, and then Lorella Jones, another physicist.
“Don Bitzer disappeared very suddenly from the scene,” says Goldwasser, “and somebody had to go in there and hold things together and it seemed reasonable and I was asked to do that….I knew nothing technically about PLATO…nothing about its hardware, nothing about its software. And therefore I was not the kind of person who should be managing a project like that, a person who knows all of that should be….I certainly felt like a fish out of water. I can remember when I first met with the staff, and tried to introduce myself and tell them what my interests were and my ignorance was and so on and so forth, it was a little clumsy. But I have to say I was welcomed, I thought very warmly.”
However much Goldwasser and his successor Lorella Jones tried to resuscitate CERL, the forces arrayed against it were to prove too immense. Goldwasser and Jones found that much of their time was eaten up finding a justification for not shutting down CERL. The assumption, it seemed clear, at the highest levels of the university, was that CERL was to be closed. Any other more positive outcome would require a miracle. And the miracle worker, the man who had managed to keep CERL going for so many years, was no longer there.
Eventually, this controversy was handed over to another vice chancellor, Chet Gardner, who believed that funding for CERL should stop, that the lab had outlived its usefulness, was not performing any meaningful research within the university community, and was a growing budgetary drag on a university already forced to endure substantial belt tightening.
CERL staffers began a letter-writing campaign, pleading with anyone and everyone whose departments or organizations had used or were using PLATO and NovaNET to urge the powers-that-be in the university to spare CERL from shutdown. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of letters were sent to the chancellor and various vice chancellors. They were unconvinced. Soon, a decision was made: a process would commence starting in 1993 to gradually shut down CERL. Staffers would be offered contract buyouts, or assistance with job placement elsewhere within the sprawling university campus. Not every staffer was offered a buyout, and the members of the lab remain resentful and bitter about this episode to this day.
During this time, another
computer laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a few minutes’ walk from CERL and led by a new hotshot professor named Larry Smarr, had stolen PLATO’s limelight. The lab, established with massive National Science Foundation funding in the early 1980s, had a mission to use supercomputers to aid in scientific research, including visualization of what years later would be called “big data.” In 1993 two student NCSA programmers, Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen, released a new software program that would change the world more than PLATO ever did: a tool called Mosaic, described as a “browser” for something new and mysterious called the World Wide Web.
—
By the end of 1994, most of CERL’s staff was gone. In order to finish out some projects, Lezlie Fillman was permitted to keep her position a little longer than most—all of the former staffers’ phone lines were routed to her desk, in an office on an otherwise quiet floor of the building—and then her position was ended as well.
In January 1995, Charles Bridges, a longtime “s” systems programmer, went up to his office on the third floor, signed on to his PLATO terminal, and sent a pnote to Michael Walker, who recalls its opening sentence being along the lines of “By the time you read this…” Then, allegedly following instructions from a how-to book called Final Exit on his desk, took his own life.
