The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Science and math certainly (he was an avid reader of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science), but there was something about Bitzer’s intimacy with electricity that brought to mind inventors and innovators like Nikola Tesla. During the World War II years he developed an interest in building radio kits with an uncle who was also a hobbyist. He’d tune in to London and other far-flung places.

  His father, Jess, built the family house, and Don was encouraged to help out. “Laying the wire, put the heating in and things, and I did that,” Bitzer says. “Worked until about midnight, and at about midnight when things were done, I’d sit down and do my homework, geometry or whatever, and get up at 6:30 the next day and go to school.”

  One summer, around 1949 or 1950, Bitzer was sent to the Carter Carburetor School in St. Louis on behalf of the family automobile agency in Collinsville. The Carter Carburetor Company, founded in 1909, became the premier manufacturer of carburetors in the United States. By the early 1950s if one purchased a Ford, Buick, Oldsmobile, Nash, or Pontiac, the car probably had a Carter carburetor under the hood. Carter’s school was the Harvard of carburetor academies. Dealerships and repair shops across the United States would send their people to Carter to get a diploma, the bestowal of which then often triggered a newspaper article back home with a headline along the lines of “Bob Phelps Ready to Take On Your Carburetor.” These proud local shops would also run ads with messages like Our mechanics are Carter graduates. Are you sure you can trust your car in the hands of those other shops in town? They don’t have any Carter diplomas on their wall. We do. Call us today!

  Bitzer discovered that he was too young to attend, as the school’s insurance policy would not cover someone younger than seventeen. “I think I was sixteen, or under sixteen,” says Bitzer. The Bitzer automobile agency told him, “Don’t worry about that, just tell them you’re older.”

  “It was the only time in my life I remember lying,” he would recall years later, “because I was told to.” He filled out the forms, and supplied his correct birth date. But that date now conflicted with what he had verbally represented to the school.

  The Carter official, “a really sharp cookie,” according to Bitzer, looked at the birth date as written on the form, then looked at Bitzer, and said, “Which is it?”

  “The birth date is right,” Bitzer said. “I was told to tell you this other. I’m sorry, I should have never done that.”

  “That’s all right, we understand,” Bitzer remembers him saying. “It’s an insurance problem, we have to get special insurance for you, we just need to know.” He added, “You’re in.”

  Bitzer loved his time at the school. But the experience of telling the lie ingrained in him a determination to, in his words, “never listen to anybody again if they told me to say even a little lie. I shouldn’t have done that. It bothers me to this day that I was talked into that.”

  Beyond learning about carburetors, the Carter experience was also where Bitzer first learned what good teaching was really like. “The short period of time that this guy taught,” he recalls, “he could put across ideas better than any teacher I’d had at school. And I’ll never forget the time after the first hour lecture, he turned to everybody there, most everybody there was grown-ups, thirty or forty years old, turned to everybody and he said, ‘If I’ve been doing a good job teaching, you won’t be able to tell me what I’m wearing.’ And he moved behind a screen, and said, ‘Am I wearing a tie? What am I wearing today?’ Nobody in the class had paid any attention to what he was wearing. Not a word. They could only remember what he said. That shows you when you’re being effective.”

  Bitzer gained a great deal of knowledge about carburetors, but what made the biggest impression on him was the quality of the instruction. “I learned an awful lot about education in that carburetor class,” he says.

  —

  The Bitzer family assumed that Don would make a career in the auto business, but his passion lay elsewhere. From around when he was just six years old, he’d always wanted to be an engineer. “I just loved putting things together and taking them apart,” Bitzer says. “Figuring out how they worked and the like, and I was good at it.”

  His stepmother, Ruth, let him and his father deal with the issue of Don’s future. “I tried to stay out of that,” she says, “because I felt that Don and Jess should make the decision themselves. The only thing that Jess ever said to me was, ‘I believe I could make a real salesman out of Don for the business, but,’ he said, ‘Don should make his own decision about it.’ ” He did. He would be going to the University of Illinois.

  One day during Bitzer’s senior year at high school, he asked a friend to pass a note to a girl in his study hall, which by some whim of scheduling combined students from the senior class with students from the sophomore class. Donald Bitzer would like to meet you, the note said. The recipient was Maryann Drost, a sophomore. She was delighted to meet Don. They dated, and four years later they married.

  Don’s competitiveness, the same competitiveness that would drive him to dare to do a thousand sit-ups a few years later, was already apparent during his high school years. “He always liked to outdo somebody at something,” says Ruth. Bitzer had been that rare breed of student: the all-around super-achiever. He was the kind of kid who never seemed to study but always got straight A’s. After acing high school and entering the University of Illinois, he not only got straight A’s again, but had such a stellar, perfect grade-point average that by graduation four years later, his name would be etched into his 1955 graduating class’s coveted Bronze Tablet, the U of I equivalent of summa cum laude.

  Bitzer arrived at the U of I during the Truman era, the beginning of the Cold War. Atomic bomb tests in the Pacific were frequent. The Korean War had already been raging for over a year, and thousands of Americans were being sent overseas to fight. College students were excluded from the draft as long as their grades were good. “They put a lot of pressure on the grades,” says Jim Dutcher. “If you let your grades slide, then you were in the draft and off to Korea fast. They were killing people pretty quickly over there.”

  Bitzer and Dutcher became pledges at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. With fifty-six fraternity houses, the University of Illinois had the largest and strongest “Greek” system in the country. For decades, leading up to and ending with the Vietnam War, the Betas beat out all the other frat houses, ruling the campus in terms of scholarship. “There was a rich tradition back in those days, the Betas just didn’t rush anybody who was not in the top 10 percent of their high school class,” says Dutcher. “So this was a brainy group of guys. People thought they were a bunch of nerds, which I guarantee they were not; it was a very, very exciting environment to be around seventy or eighty guys and all pretty darn well accomplished.”

  Dutcher remembers Bitzer being a bit of a slob. “He’d drive these guys nuts, because he wouldn’t keep the room clean. I can still recall walking in there and seeing him study, and he would lie on his back, and he would have his calves up on his chair, his study chair, and he’d look like he’s asleep, and the rest of the guys, accomplished, semi-cocky if you will, and everybody’s saying, ‘How the hell is he ever…he’s not going to get any kind of grades at all. He’s kind of nutty the way he studies.’ He was not typical at all. Of course, midterms come out, and he’s 5.0. It just really upset the upperclassman he was rooming with. They were getting ready to lower the boom on him, tell him to shape up, and hell, he was getting better grades than anybody.” Bill Forsyth, for a while his roommate, believed Bitzer had a photographic memory, which would help explain his straight-A performance, and felt he was destined for the engineering life. “He knew more than the professors,” says Forsyth. “He would work out a formula that was different than what was in the book, but came up with the right answer.”

  Bitzer took electives on a wide range of subjects, like English literature. “The son of a gun would take some lofty-to-tough course as an elective,” Dutcher recalls. Everybody would be
griping about the course, how tough the professor was—the usual litany of college student complaint—but Bitzer still got an A. He finished his undergraduate electrical engineering degree in 1955, got married to his high school sweetheart Maryann that summer, and came right back in the fall to begin work on a master’s degree. His family would have been happier if he’d gone back to Collinsville to join the family auto business, but Bitzer was determined to continue his engineering education. Soon he was working at the Control Systems Laboratory on some of their classified projects, using the ILLIAC to process real-time radar data.

  Five years later, at twenty-six, his master’s and PhD degrees complete, Bitzer found himself being invited by Dan Alpert to take the lead on something entirely new: building a computer that could teach.

  —

  The very earliest days of the PLATO system’s creation are fuzzy and details are lacking. There’s almost no printed record, and little remains of lab notes, photographs, film, prototypes, the day-to-day documentation of progress. Had Donald Bitzer and his collaborators been meticulous documenters of every detail during those early days (and especially nights), instead of focusing on the actual design, building, and testing a real system, the project very might well have lost its momentum, and wound up abandoned. They were too busy building to be documenting. Bitzer was finally being given a shot to be what he’d dreamed of being since early childhood: an electrical engineer. History would just have to stay out of the way.

  “I dislike history,” Don Bitzer has said on more than one occasion. “I generally don’t read books,” he’s said as well. He’s too busy trying, testing, inventing, and building new things to be bogged down by someone’s subjective and incomplete accounting of the past. Too many instances of those subjective and incomplete accounts have left him skeptical. He’s admitted that what’s written about him is often inaccurate to the point of being, in his words, “bogus.”

  —

  While Bitzer was known to his colleagues in PLATO’s early years as an excellent writer of code (the ILLIAC was a formidable beast, and only a few elite “code whisperers” knew the right incantations to make it do its magic), in the fifty years of PLATO he was hardly ever known to be a writer of words. (Alpert in interviews was quick to point out that it was Alpert who wrote anything published that listed Bitzer and Alpert as coauthors.) Unlike the conventional “publish or perish” pressure most professors are under during their careers, especially early on when they’re just starting out, Bitzer somehow managed to play the academia game without having to write much at all. Just like in high school and throughout his undergraduate years, he was able to sail through the politics and pressures of academic life through a combination of luck, magic, salesmanship, and chutzpah—he was the son of a car dealer, after all—and a mission-focus bullheadedness that made others stand back and wonder, How does he do it?

  “Publish or perish” would not be the Donald Bitzer Way. With him, the mantra became “PLATO or perish.” His approach fit more with the present-day Silicon Valley mind-set of build something, anything, get it up and running, and show it to other people as soon as possible. Silicon Valley calls it demo or die. Stop yakking and build the damn thing and prove it does what you say it is supposed to do.

  Compared to Bitzer’s bemused but detached view of the long history of PLATO, Alpert decades later seemed bitter about the story’s inaccuracies and could get downright cranky about the details of who did what, when, and why. “Bitzer remembers it flat out wrong!” was usually Alpert’s first utterance in response to the words “PLATO” and “Bitzer.” One possible explanation for Alpert’s frustration is that, as the fates would have it, he would play the role of “champion” in this story, and Bitzer would play the role of “inventor.” Inventors are the builders, the ones who usually get the recognition. Champions are the sponsors, the adult supervision, the mentorship. They’re believers in the inventor’s vision, a vision they share, and they’re usually the ones with the money or at least the access to the ones with the money—just as important. The champions are the ones who block and tackle anything that might get in the way of the inventor being successful. Champions are essential. You might say Alpert was like a venture capitalist and Bitzer was the whiz-kid start-up founder.

  Good technology champions help create a favorable environment for inventors. Daniel Alpert was, for PLATO’s first dozen years, that dedicated champion who fought behind the scenes to make PLATO happen and make sure PLATO kept happening. He kept Bitzer and PLATO under his wing, and when bureaucratic forces attempted to pull them apart, or when Bitzer would occasionally disappear to pursue other interests, Alpert was the one who kept the funding flowing and the momentum going.

  —

  It would not have been unusual for someone in Alpert’s position to take the findings of Richard M. Brown and his committee, charged with investigating the feasibility of CSL starting a computer-based education project, and tell his boss, Dean Everitt, that he agreed with the committee’s findings. He could have simply said, “It’s a great idea, but unless we find some superhuman with deep technical, educational, psychological, and subject matter knowledge, my recommendation is that we should not pursue this.” He might not have even brought it up, telling the dean instead that his lab is still exploring ideas for new projects and we’ll get back to you. But Alpert was not an ordinary laboratory director, and CSL was no ordinary laboratory. They relished hard problems. Impossible problems. Problems nobody else would or could take on. Building a computerized teacher was a hard problem. Finding someone to lead such a project was not entirely impossible. Genuinely intrigued and enthusiastic about Sherwin’s original computerized Book with Feedback idea, he wasn’t about to let a few minor details like the lack of a key senior staff person to oversee a brand-new, high-risk project get in the way. Still, it remains remarkable that Alpert chose to disregard the general gloom and doom of Brown’s assessment. Even more remarkable is that Alpert came to reverse his own thinking, in the period of a few days, between May 24 and June 3, 1960.

  It was during this time that he took his quick trip to Washington and had his lightning-bolt epiphany on the flight back home. Now that he had decided that “teaching people how to use the computer” should be the subject matter for the initial project, it was a “simple matter” of finding someone who had the drive, enthusiasm, interest, and expertise to not only design a computer system that could teach, but design one that could teach people how to use a computer.

  Also remarkable is his choice of a junior engineer at CSL, someone with a noticeable lack of major accomplishments, lack of publications, and lack of teaching experience. Bitzer himself once confessed, “Perhaps the main reason I got the chance was that most of the people with more experience didn’t think the project had a prayer.”

  If it were up to the university bureaucracy, Bitzer would have been deemed unsuited for leading such a project: he was low on the academic totem pole, and low in the pecking order within CSL, only twenty-six, and a freshly minted PhD with little teaching experience. He wasn’t a tenured professor. CSL knew Bitzer was brilliant; everyone knew it. To Alpert, Bitzer was still as green as a month-old stalk of corn, “a graduate student who had never written anything in his life, and had never taught anything in his life. I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him,” he said. Jack Desmond, CSL’s business manager, remembers the meeting “in which Alpert told Bitzer that yes, they would be forming a new group within CSL to pursue this kind of research and development, and that yes, Bitzer would be the titular head of that group. I wasn’t in that meeting, but I was in the anteroom just outside of where Bitzer and Alpert met, and Bitzer came running out, saying, ‘Jack, what in the hell does titular mean?’ ”

  And yet, offering him the project shows that Alpert did trust him, though with a short leash. There was something about Bitzer that gave Alpert confidence that he was the guy. Perhaps Bitzer was in some small way like the son he never had. Perhaps Alpert saw in Bitzer
some of that grim determination Jim Dutcher had witnessed on the porch outside Beta House when Don Bitzer bet his Beta brothers he could do a thousand sit-ups, and then went and did just that. Perhaps it was that Alpert saw Bitzer as a builder, not just a talker. He was a dedicated engineer who had the technical ability, the tenacity to stick with a problem until it was solved, and a catchy enthusiasm and a vision that attracted respect, admiration, followers—and believers.

  What Bitzer had going for him was a genius for engineering, particularly electrical engineering, that others recognized. You could throw down a challenge to him and he would not walk away, he would figure out how to build a viable solution. He had an ebullient personality that reflected a passion and joy for his work. It was infectious. Everyone saw it. Many were drawn to it. Everyone also saw the never-say-no car-dealer side to his personality (countless colleagues would describe this side of Bitzer as “snake-oil salesman”). Alpert was not blind to this, but nevertheless he had enough confidence in this twenty-six-year-old wunderkind—Bitzer’s confidence no doubt fed Alpert’s confidence—to turn him loose and give him a shot at running the project.

  By now Alpert wasn’t pitching the idea as just a Book with Feedback. He pitched it to Bitzer with a lot more focus. He described it as a “teaching system,” and the first thing it needed to do was teach people how to use a computer, via the computer.

  Bitzer, never one to say no, told him he’d think about it.

  Alpert insists that Bitzer wasn’t interested right at the start. “I had to twist his arm to take it, and two or three weeks later he said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ ”

  Bitzer’s version of the story says he told Alpert, “First of all, hold the letter, because certainly that’s not the case, we can do better than that. If you want a plan, give me a couple of days, and I’ll come up with one, how to approach it, and then I’ll see what we can do to implement it.” Later he added, “After a few days I came back, I had an idea about how we might do it using some equipment that was already around, got permission to order some other stuff that we didn’t have, got myself a programmer by the name of Peter Braunfeld, who was in the laboratory, and one technician…and that was how we started.”