The first-ever reunion of "PLATO people" brought tears to the eyes of nearly 150 participants gathered for a moving tribute to Don Bitzer, whose dream of using computers for education resulted in the creation of the world's first online community in the early '70s. Bitzer received two standing ovations during the reunion, which featured accolades by PLATO alumni like Brand Fortner, who exchanged marriage vows with his wife on a PLATO monitor 20 years before online weddings were in vogue, and Bruce Parrello, creator of the PLATO "news report," the first online news service.
Michael Walker, who organized Saturday's event at the University of Illinois with alumni coordinator Judy Tolliver, says the reunion was a fitting tribute to Bitzer, "a brilliant man who was able to look past the surface and see what people's real capabilities were." In the '70s, Bitzer's Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) - the home of the PLATO program, designed to enable students to learn coursework in a graphical networked environment - was energized by Bitzer's "self-confidence and real caring for people," says Walker.
"Don ran a real meritocracy," Walker observes. "It didn't matter if you were male or female, 13 or 77. He made an environment where people could really be creative and get things done. And Don wasn't threatened by brilliance in others, which had a ripple effect throughout the lab."
Walker recalls that one of Bitzer's US$1-an-hour student employees, David Frankel, was only 13 when Bitzer hired him. "Don had to promise that he would feed David so many times a day," Walker remembers with a chuckle. Frankel - who offered his own tribute at the reunion - is now the CEO of Jetstream Communications.
Part of a week-long cyberfest that boasted a "birthday party" for HAL and a reunion of ILLIAC programmers, the PLATO reunion included a two-hour tournament of Empire, a multiplayer Star Trek-inspired spacewar game that anticipated networked games like Doom by two decades. (The Klingons won, 72-64.)
By combining features similar to modern email, newsgroups, and live chat - along with graphical displays and touch-screen interfaces - PLATO offered users many of the same networking tools as the Net, but without network lag.
"There's a general feeling among PLATO people that the Net isn't as good as what we had," says David Woolley, whose PLATO Notes spurred the growth of the community by creating prototypes of email and discussion groups. "The PLATO system allowed you to develop any kind of interaction that you felt was appropriate," Woolley explains, "and the prime directive was instant response-time.... When I get on the Web, I feel like I'm wading through molasses."
Though the ARPAnet and PLATO were germinating in neighboring buildings on the University of Illinois campus at the same time, says Woolley, there was hardly any interaction between the two nascent communities. "We were thinking that the rest of the world didn't have anything to offer us, because we were so far ahead. Then the world did catch up to us, but PLATO was almost forgotten as something of an oddity."
Tolliver - who conceived the reunion and belonged to a posse of PLATO devotees called "Hardcore" - agrees with Woolley's assessment that the project was a once-in-a-lifetime magnet for creative people. "The Internet is inventing the wheel all over again, but there was a wealth of research done on the PLATO system. I don't know if anyone's looking at it."
Bitzer himself, now a distinguished professor at North Carolina State University, hardly uses email, he told Wired News. "I may have started it, but I don't want to read it anymore. I don't want to spend all my time bombarding people with messages."
In recent years, Bitzer has applied coding theory to genetics. He gives the credit for the success of PLATO to the "wonderful people who worked around the clock" at CERL.
"My real goal was not entertainment," Bitzer declares. "The goal was to make it possible for everyone to get a good education. That's still the goal."
