The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  If CSL was going to declassify itself and become more integrated into the mainstream university, yet still expect funding from military agencies, using computers to advance the university’s mission was the way to go. Sherwin described his idea as a computerized “book with feedback,” not unlike what Thorndike had envisioned back in 1912. By 1959, articles on the wonders of teaching machines were commonplace in the nation’s magazines and newspapers. Academics convened conferences to discuss the latest thinking and advances in the field. Skinner was busy attempting to commercialize his latest machines with IBM and Rheem. Norman Crowder had chosen a different path: his “scrambled textbooks” and random-access film-based AutoTutor devices merely hinted at potential applications if you had been able to take the content of the book and program it into a computer. If you were working on applications of digital computers in an engineering laboratory in 1959, and you heard about teaching machines and programmed instruction, it was not hard to put two and two together and see the potential that lay in educational applications of digital computing.

  Sherwin also took his idea to William Everitt, dean of the Engineering School. Everitt and Alpert were both intrigued. “Chal’s idea appealed to me very much,” Alpert says. It appealed so much so that he wanted Sherwin to lead a project to pursue answers to the great questions he was asking. “I twisted Chal’s arm real hard. I said, ‘Look, I got money, you take this on,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’ll think about it.’ ” But Sherwin was more of a visionary than a project director and in the end was not keen on heading up a project. “I don’t want to do that kind of thing, I want to have ideas, I don’t want to do it,” Alpert recalls Sherwin telling him.

  Sherwin dropping out didn’t diminish Alpert’s enthusiasm for the notion of a computer-powered “Book with Feedback.” But like all great ideas, it would never go anywhere without leadership and execution. He had to figure out how to turn this into a real project at CSL and get someone to lead a team to do it. He next approached CSL physicist Richard M. Brown, whom Alpert would later describe as “a strong person in the use of computers for naval applications,” asking him to form an interdisciplinary committee to explore Sherwin’s idea in detail, and then make recommendations on how such an idea could be turned into a successful project for CSL. Brown put out feelers across the university to find people for his committee. He recruited Larry Stolurow, a professor from the psychology department, as Stolurow was interested in programmed instruction and teaching machines, and had been present at the 1958 conference in Philadelphia along with B. F. Skinner and Sidney Pressey. Other recruits included Max Beberman from UICSM, and Rupert Evans, head of the education department. Chalmers Sherwin sat in on the meetings.

  Meanwhile, Donald Bitzer submitted his dissertation, a crisp, ninety-eight-page affair entitled “Signal Amplitude Limiting and Phase Quantization in Antenna Systems,” in December 1959 and took a vacation in Cuba over the Christmas holiday. On January 1, he turned twenty-six. Later that month he was awarded his PhD degree. Bitzer was still considered relatively junior among the CSL staff and was not invited to participate in the committee, despite his being known as a very sharp, competent engineer. Years later he would recall seeing the assembled group meeting from time to time. He remembers occasional shouting and arguments coming from the room.

  The committee began meeting in the first few months of 1960. “We met usually with bag lunches,” recalls Stolurow. “It was somewhat informal, in talking about what might be done. I would leave the laboratory in the psych department and go over and join the group, and one of the people I developed a relationship with, most closely related to, was Beberman.” The committee met roughly every week for a few months. Alpert sat in on the last few meetings, which for many years since he described in the exactly the same way: “A worse Tower of Babel I have never heard in my LIFE!” He found that the psychologists in the room looked at the problem from only a psychology perspective. The engineers viewed it from only an engineering perspective. The educators viewed it from only an education perspective. Nobody could agree on anything. They were not getting anywhere. Says Alpert, “Each guy had the position that if it was going to teach math it had to teach his grade of math, if it was going to teach science it had to be his field of science, if it was going to be engineering then the engineers would have control. Then there was an education person who thought he was the key person, and if it was going to succeed then they had to have him as the leader of the project. Well, it wasn’t long before I realized with a bunch of prima donnas who had a specialty—who knew their field of math in the eighth grade or math in the fifth grade, or engineering—it wasn’t going to go.”

  Brown wrote a five-page letter to Alpert on May 3. Whatever enthusiasm for the project Brown conveyed in the letter was overshadowed by the letter’s grim conclusion that delicately questioned whether the project would ever succeed. “Many technical questions and disagreements arose,” Brown wrote. “It is apparent that this field is in a considerable state of flux and is subject to most of the conflicts now afflicting the field of education in general.”

  The committee kept close to Sherwin’s original Book with Feedback vision. “The immediate and long range objective of this research should be to produce an educationally (but not necessarily economically) practical mechanization of the textbook,” Brown wrote, more prophetically than he or anyone else could possibly have known at the time.

  Brown went on to recommend that the initial project focus on the delivery of education to one student only. “The burden of proof,” he wrote, “regarding suitability for parallel use by many students or use by groups of students should rest with outside critics. This is not to ignore the fact that parallel use is of prime economic importance, but to be saddled with that requirement at the outset is to ignore the probable benefits of such developmental work now under way and to unduly restrict the initial efforts.”

  The committee had difficulty recommending what subject the computer should initially be programmed to teach. Physics? Medicine? Math? French? Biology? Electrical engineering? So instead of identifying a specific subject, Brown’s committee did something that committees from time immemorial excel at: they punted on the issue. “The question of the subject matter to be programmed is a difficult one and reflects the present ignorance of the nature of educational processes as well as an understandable uncertainty as to the optimal use of a teaching machine.” In other words, let someone else figure it out.

  Brown continued, listing problems that telegraphed to Alpert that the committee not only couldn’t agree on what subject the system should teach first, but also that they didn’t know where to begin or how to go about building the machine. “It is believed that the two most critical problems in the teaching machine area are: 1. the detailed design and construction of the educational program; and 2. the technical realization of a method for storage and retrieval of the educational materials used in the program.” He went on to list a random assortment of suggested devices, including “closed T.V. recorders,” and various audiovisual systems built by Kodak and Magnavox. But the committee was stumped as to what was the best way to build a random-access system that could fetch educational content, be it for display or for audio playback.

  In terms of personnel, the situation was equally fraught. Brown recommended that the project start with “two distinct groups,” one for programming and one for engineering. Brown’s committee was especially at a loss to identify an overall project leader for these groups, and suggested that if such an individual existed at all, he might have to have superhuman abilities.

  The most critical personnel problem remains to be discussed: that of overall direction of the project. This is a truly interdisciplinary project and it is clear that considerable effort is necessary to keep the efforts in the disciplines of education, psychology, and engineering well correlated. It is essential that the project be headed by a person capable of understanding the elements of each discipline entering into the project. Many de
cisions will have to be made on an intuitive basis which affect all parts of the program. Without an appreciation of all the components in the program on the part of the leader, the project will be crippled if not doomed.

  Brown’s conclusion to Alpert was that it all came down to people. Find the right people, and the project might have a chance. Hand over the project to the wrong people, and you might as well forget it:

  It is believed that the program outlined above is both natural to and desirable for CSL to pursue. However, at the present time, two critical elements are lacking: 1. a senior staff person to assume responsibility for the programming effort, and 2. a suitable project supervisor. If these cannot be found within this University or obtained from outside, it is believed unwise for CSL to proceed further.

  Alpert tried to “volunteer” Brown to take the project on himself. “He asked me if I would be the head,” Brown remembers, “and I was burning with a gemlike flame to do some computer ideas of mine. I wasn’t ready. I’d just come out of that Cornfield project and I wasn’t ready for what was obviously going to be a long-term, big-haul, long-haul project. And I said I didn’t care for it, didn’t want to do it at this time.”

  So Alpert went to Stolurow. “I declined,” Stolurow recalled, “because I felt I didn’t have a strong enough engineering background. I knew what the system had to do, at least in my perception at that time, but I didn’t feel I knew enough about the engineering aspects for implementing a design.”

  Sherwin, Brown, and Stolurow: all no. On May 24, Alpert began drafting a letter to Dean Everitt, summarizing the Brown Committee’s conclusions. Like Brown’s assessment, Alpert’s focused in on project staffing, and in particular, who would lead the project, as the key to success. Alpert believed that the project leader needed to be a generalist capable of understanding the overlaps from all the conflicting constituencies. “In view of their interrelatedness,” Alpert wrote, “it is most unlikely that four specialists, in say, a given subject, computer technology, communications media, etc., could make these decisions in committee.”

  He never finished his original marked-up three-page draft. He had a trip scheduled to Washington to meet with military funding agencies, so he set the letter aside. On his return from Washington, Alpert had an epiphany. “Flying back…I suddenly realized that, if there wasn’t at least one person who was not only good and interested in teaching but could teach a subject and could design a computer-based system…it was obvious that you needed a person who was interested in teaching how to use a computer. Because if you’re going to have the talent to design it, that’s the obvious subject, right? I mean, it was clear. It had never occurred to anybody on that committee.

  “What we wanted was an inventor,” Alpert would recall. “From what I’d seen in the past of invention, of creativity, I knew the project would have to go to someone with both the ability to design a very different kind of machine and the motivation to try it.” Someone who had a genuine passion for teaching people how to use a computer. Someone who was just crazy enough to take the project on despite its slim chance of success.

  Alpert started looking around CSL, wondering if there was “a person in captivity who has the qualifications to design a computer-based system.”

  He believed there was such a person.

  3

  The Super-Achiever

  Whoever swung the bat must have had slippery hands. The bat flew into the air, and as it flew it twirled, and as it twirled it smashed into Don Bitzer’s head, right along an eyebrow. Bitzer and his Beta Theta Pi fraternity brothers were at a picnic that some of the university fraternities and sororities had organized. On this occasion everyone had decided to play softball. Now Bitzer was bleeding. “A big slash,” recalls Jim Dutcher, a classmate and fraternity brother of Bitzer’s. “We took him to the hospital and had to stitch him all up.”

  Three or four days later, Dutcher, Bitzer, and some other Betas were hanging out, shooting the breeze, when the subject of physical achievements came up. That got Bitzer and Dutcher talking about sit-ups. All of a sudden, Bitzer declared that he could do a thousand sit-ups without stopping. The Beta brothers were skeptical. “He was not out of shape,” Dutcher says, “but he wasn’t in great shape. To look at him, he was kind of heavy, and we all pooh-poohed it.” But Bitzer was serious, and pretty soon it developed into a bet. “We put up a dollar apiece, probably fifteen guys betting against it, so it was big money,” Dutcher says. Bitzer, stitches still fresh in his forehead, lay down on the floor and started doing sit-ups. He did ten. He did twenty. He did fifty. He did one hundred. Minutes rolled by. Still, he kept going, first to the astonishment of and soon to the concern of his Beta brothers. “He gets to three hundred, four hundred, and we’re begging him to stop,” says Dutcher. “STOP! We’ll pay you the money.”

  Bitzer did not stop. He did all one thousand.

  “You talk about grim determination,” says Dutcher. “I thought he was going to split his stitches open and we’d have to take him back to the hospital…’cuz he’s getting red in the face and all, but he just went and did it.”

  —

  Donald Lester Bitzer was a New Year’s baby, born at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1934, in East St. Louis, Illinois. He grew up in Collinsville, “the Horseradish Capital of the World,” a small southern Illinois town situated a few miles east of the Mississippi River, on the west side of which sprawled the St. Louis metropolis.

  Hailing from Germany, the Bitzer clan made their way to Pennsylvania as farmers, eventually settling in Illinois. Donald Bitzer’s great-grandfather arrived in Collinsville in 1905 to open a feed store and livery stable. In 1917, Walter Bitzer, the oldest of the sons, went to St. Louis to see about getting a Ford automobile dealership. “In those days, car dealers were called ‘garages’ when they first came out,” recalled Earle Bitzer, a cousin of Don’s, “and they were in the alley like the blacksmith, they weren’t out front with the showrooms and the glass.” Much to his surprise, the Ford people in St. Louis told Walter there already was a dealer in Collinsville. Walter hadn’t realized it because, sure enough, the Ford garage was hidden in some back alley. The Ford people suggested Walter talk to the Dodge people instead, which he did. There, he found an opening, and Bitzer & Co. was launched.

  Donald’s father, Jesse, born in 1902, and Jesse’s three brothers kept the Bitzer automobile business going for decades. By the time Don was in high school in the late 1940s, the Bitzer auto business was booming. The postwar American economy was growing quickly and everyone wanted—and was starting to expect—a great job, a home of their own, and, perhaps most important, a shiny new car. Business was so good that the Bitzer clan would over the coming years open up four separate dealerships in towns across southern Illinois.

  Bitzer was not just brainy. In high school he played on every sort of sports team, and at home played on a lighted basketball court in the backyard. “We’d play basketball until eleven or twelve every night,” he says. “I didn’t do a whole lot of studying, I didn’t really have to….Generally speaking, school was not very good. If you came from our high school, only maybe two or three people would go to college. It wasn’t considered a great school, but the mathematics, the geometry teacher I had was Polish and he was just terrific. Instead of turning me off at geometry, like many people, it really turned me on. So, generally speaking, the math part was fine, the rest of the education was pretty poor, but the University of Illinois took care of that really fast.”

  A testament to the level of Bitzer’s high school visibility and popularity is the frequency with which his name and photo appear throughout his high school yearbooks. Like Dan Alpert years before him, in senior year he would be named class valedictorian. That same year he was vice president of the Honor Society, vice president of the Monogram Club, president of the Math Club, president of the Pioneers Club, co-captain of the football team (alas, it finished with a 0-8 season), and a member of the Senior Class Council. He was also the escort to the
Homecoming Queen. His senior class voted him one of the five top students in the class, in his case, “outstanding student.” The school yearbook had this to say: “Don not only chose the hardest courses but excelled in all subjects. Science, Math, and Electricity were his best.”

  Donald Bitzer, c. 1964, in PLATO III classroom Credit 8