by Brian Dear
Problems arose when Norris stuck with impulsive decisions that were questionable, often based on bad information. Patrick Stubbs recalls how, while running a sales training course for the CYBERNET division of CDC, he would get senior executives from the company to be guest speakers. One such speaker was Norris’s right-hand man, Norbert Berg. The attendees would pepper their guest with questions, such as “What’s it like working with Norris” and “What’s it like in a staff meeting with Norris,” and he told them it was akin to visiting the scene of a traffic accident every day. “Somebody once described Norris as having a whim of iron,” says Stubbs. “He would get an idea…he’d make some sort of casual remark, and I know this because I knew a few of the executives at the time, and they would tell me this: he would make some sort of casual remark, just as an observation, like, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if’ or ‘what happened to’ or ‘how about’—somebody would take that, and they would turn it into some kind of multimillion-dollar program.”
Norris ruled Control Data with a very firm hand, says Stubbs. “What he said, happened, it doesn’t make any difference. If he set his mind on something, that was going to happen. Witness the Education Company. I’m sure a lot of people told him it wasn’t a smart thing to do, and he did it anyway. He put a billion dollars into it, and what would Control Data have been if they’d put the billion dollars into integrated circuit research?”
William Norris was a maverick CEO, and as CDC expanded and grew richer in the 1970s selling their mainframes and peripheral equipment around the world, he put in place a variety of undertakings that other companies—and Wall Street—viewed as ill-advised, reckless, or worse. “Addressing society’s major unmet needs” became Norris’s rallying cry, a remarkably progressive mantra for a tech company in the 1970s and 1980s, and one that the rest of the industry and financial world regarded with befuddlement or derision.
Over many years of research for this book, including discussions on the Control Data culture with dozens of current and former CDC employees up and down the chain of command, one of the most common assessments of Norris was that he was a good-hearted, strong leader, a total believer in PLATO, but that he was surrounded by yes-men. Other researchers and journalists who covered CDC during its heyday would hear similar refrains. “His lieutenants are the problem,” Bob Linsenman told an interviewer in the mid-1980s, while Norris was still in charge. “They try so hard to please Norris that they don’t give a shit if the business falls apart.”
In 1984, Randall Rothenberg wrote a profile of Bill Norris and Control Data for Esquire magazine. The article never ran. However, Rothenberg’s recollections of the article’s conclusions shed light on the predicament Norris and CDC were in, particularly with regard to PLATO. “Control Data,” he says, “was an example of what we’d later call industrial policy; its expertise was in seeking government funding for technology projects relating to supercomputing. When the government market for supercomputing for military and economic applications began to dry up (because of, e.g., the advance of minicomputing), CDC, instead of adapting its business model, began to seek new uses within a government welfare structure for its existing supercomputing technology. Using the technology for training, small business development, etc., was a logical extension of this. What CDC could not do was diverge from a model predicated on powerful central control. The whole notion of distributed systems—in computing, in social welfare, in anything else, it seems—was totally foreign to it. So the inapplicability of its technology to the social-welfare aims it was seeking to address was something the company could not work around. Put another way, it had come up with the perfect Great Society solution—twenty years late.”
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Part of the legal agreement between UI and CDC called for an ongoing technology-sharing relationship between CERL and CDC, not only on hardware developments but also, perhaps more important, on system software. CDC installed its own PLATO system for development and testing in Minnesota, with its own team of “s” and “p” engineers just like CERL’s team. Together they created mechanisms for a weekly sharing of the source code each respective lab was working on, merging all of the changes each site made to the code with the goal of keeping each site in sync with the other. Rather than shipping computer tapes back and forth, they developed a dedicated telecommunications line, known as the Link, which enabled file transfers between the CYBERs. The Link also enabled a user on the Minneapolis PLATO system to remotely sign on to CERL’s PLATO system, and vice versa. Eventually the Link became something a number of PLATO systems had around the world, enabling the sending and receiving of pnotes on any connected system, along with support for synchronized, inter-system notesfiles. It was only a baby version of the Internet-like vision Bitzer had expounded on in 1975 when he spoke of two hundred mainframes powering a million terminals, but it was an innovative start.
Over time, several junior systems programmers at CERL who were also students at UI either graduated or dropped out, and wound up with jobs working at CDC. This cross-fertilization only furthered the two organizations working together, and helped CDC better understand the inner workings of CERL and who knew what. However, moving from CERL to CDC was an eye-opener.
“Working there was totally different,” said David Woolley, who graduated from UI in the late 1970s and joined Control Data in Minneapolis. “At CERL it was basically anarchy, at least for the system programmers. There was very little control. Paul Tenczar was ostensibly head of software development, but I think that was because some years before there’d been some personality conflicts, arguments and stuff….People didn’t get assignments to do things, especially in the very early days, people just did whatever they felt like….Sometimes there would be incredible arguments with people yelling and screaming and kicking garbage cans and stuff. I remember hearing one terrific shouting match between probably Dave Andersen and Paul Tenczar, where I think Tenczar ended up yelling, ‘I’m going to delete your signon!’ Andersen said, ‘Not if I delete yours first!’ It was a race to the console to see who could delete the other signon first. Things like that happened sometimes, it was pretty chaotic.”
When Woolley arrived at CDC, he found a large corporate bureaucracy. “And at Control Data, everything went through channels, you got assigned a project, and you did it. Requests for changes came down from the PLATO Business Office, which ostensibly was communicating with customers and was deciding what customers needed and wanted…but in fact I think what they were doing was sitting around and thinking of things they thought were neat.”
It took a period of several years, but CDC’s commercial ideas for PLATO began to diverge from CERL’s mission. Some of the systems staff at CERL grew frustrated at some of the changes CDC would make, or how time-consuming it was becoming to merge the different sources into a single code base. At one point Bob Rader, one of CERL’s senior systems staffers, had had enough with the increased difficulties, and left CERL in early 1982.
One day CDC inadvertently introduced a bug into the code that did no harm on the Minneapolis machines but regularly crashed CERL’s mainframe, causing outages during prime-time service to thousands of students. “It was just a fluke,” recalls Al Harkrader, “it was one they didn’t catch and it was a killer and it was takin’ down CERL pretty regularly, until we tracked it down and then the guys at CERL got all miffed and they decided to tell the guys at CDC that they were gonna end code sharing, they weren’t gonna share code anymore. And so they were gettin’ ready to drop the bomb on CDC guys.” Some of these dissatisfied CERL staffers had been teenage kids who’d gotten jobs as junior systems programmers and operators, and had stuck on for the next four or five years, so they were now in the twenties. They began to have second thoughts about “dropping the bomb” on CDC regarding the split—CDC being much bigger than they were, Harkrader recalls. But eventually they did drop the bomb, against Bitzer’s advice, says Harkrader, who describes CDC’s subsequent reaction as “Hey, cool. Nice knowin’ ya!” CDC had called
an astonished CERL’s bluff.
Harkrader recalls CERL thinking that their CDC counterparts would apologize and do something when they “dropped the bomb,” but instead, recalls Harkrader, the next time CDC sent a manager down for a routine monthly meeting, the manager, upon hearing the news about ending code sharing, told the CERL team, “Great, I was going to ask you guys about that.”
At the end of the meeting, when the manager walked out of the room, Harkrader stopped him and asked, “Does that mean you’re going to have more openings up there?”
Shortly after that, Harkrader packed up, moved to Minneapolis, and joined Control Data.
Steve Nordberg, an engineering manager at CDC, believes the time had come for CDC and CERL to end the code sharing, as it had become a roadblock to progress. “We were doing everything we could to understand what the customers wanted from the system and drive the system in that direction,” he says. “We had new hardware to run that CERL didn’t, I mean, for example, the introduction of that Extended Semiconductor Memory involved a lot of work on our part to make PLATO work—that CERL had no interest in. Over time the interests of the two groups drifted apart. And there got to a point where it just got too hard to continue to share code. And at that point we stopped it. Frankly it was the right thing for both sides because we needed to do what our customers were asking us for, and Illinois had both the research mentality and the internal customer base, and we just determined that the underlying systems couldn’t be shared anymore and at the courseware level we were going to continue doing what we could to keep the TUTOR language in sync so that courseware could still be shared, and we were reasonably successful in that. But it was pretty much inevitable, anytime you have something coming out of a university, into a corporation, eventually you stop having identical systems.”
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Another difference between the CDC and CERL PLATO cultures was how they dealt with the online community. It had been born on CERL organically, thanks to the notesfiles, TERM-talk, and all the rest of the communication and collaboration tools, and was utilized heavily. CDC inherited all of those tools, but viewed them with trepidation. The corporate culture was not used to having a way for any employee—let alone a customer—to speak his or her mind and share opinions on any subject whatsoever to CDC and its other customers. The last thing CDC wanted to become was a common carrier, like the phone company, just a service that people used and what they used it for and what they said through it being completely outside the control of the company. So, while CDC PLATO systems had notesfiles, it took off more slowly. It did not help, from CDC’s conservative corporate perspective, for all these young hotshots who had grown up as students on CERL’s PLATO system and lived and breathed the online life, to get jobs at CDC and dive right back into the notesfiles and re-create the scene they were used to with CERL. However, that is largely what happened over the years (though eventually CDC employees were discouraged or directly disallowed from posting notes using their official company signons).
For example, around the time that =ipr= launched on the CERL PLATO system—causing such a stir because it used the recently introduced “Anonymous Option”—Luke Kaven, who was a student at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and had been exposed to CERL’s notesfiles earlier at Cornell, decided to create an =ipr= notesfile on the Control Data PLATO system, using a professor’s account over at the nearby University of Massachusetts. “This was kind of radical,” Kaven says, “because of the content of it, sex and drugs and homosexuality, very personal things, and I thought, ‘This is something interesting to study,’ and I wanted to do an academic project studying the way that people disclosed things about themselves in this new context. And so I used the UMass account…to create a notesfile, the counterpart to =ipr=, on the Minnesota system. I remember I did that, I announced it in Public Notes, went home for the night, came back the next day, and I was in trouble. Somebody in CDC headquarters said—apparently it went all the way up to the top, to Bill Norris or somebody—and they said, ‘Delete this notesfile immediately and whoever this person is, have them fired.’…Nobody in the company wanted to have that kind of discourse on the CDC system. So I became sort of notorious for that, and it took a few days before I convinced them to keep my job.”
As CDC gained more and more customers, and built out multiple PLATO systems serving clients across the nation and into other countries, the company continued to bump up against an inevitable rising tide of a burgeoning online community of users, just as had been the case at CERL. The white-collar, three-piece-suit, corporate culture of CDC executives was not only antithetical to the concept of a freewheeling online community, they considered it a threat to their business, something that could scare off potential customers who might be offended by things they read in those notesfiles.
In time, CDC brought in its lawyers, new to the concept of online communities, and the result was a modification to CDC PLATO systems such that every time a user signed on, before they got to the Author Mode, they had to read an infamous, stern disclaimer written in classic legalese:
Certain message switching capabilities (computer assisted transmission of messages between two or more points) are provided as part of the PLATO system service offering. All uses made of these capabilities must be incidental to, that is, must facilitate or be directly related to, the development, proper use and application of instructional and related materials of the PLATO system. Use of these message switching capabilities for any other purpose is in violation of this policy and applicable law.
It seemed to make the lawyers and executives happy, while the user community largely ignored it and went on creating and participating in notesfiles on every hot topic imaginable, for years to come.
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Over the years at CDC, William Norris had instituted various annual awards ceremonies for outstanding employees. The Shark Club was an event where Shark Awards were given out to the top-producing sales people, each of whom had very likely sold millions of dollars of CYBERs and other equipment in the past year. The events were typically held at resorts in warm locales. Another such ceremony, the Tarpon Club event, was held each year at a resort in Tarpon Springs, Florida. The Tarpon Award was an award Bill Norris handed out to distinguished employees working on PLATO.
Jim Glish, who over the course of his CDC career would be handed two Tarpon Awards from Bill Norris, recalls one year installing five PLATO terminals in a room for the benefit of board members of Commercial Credit, CDC’s financial subsidiary and a major supporter of PLATO, so they could receive, as Glish puts it, “an experience of what this PLATO thing was like that they were spending a ton of money on….Commercial Credit had deep pockets back in those days, and a lot of the Commercial Credit money was being used to underwrite some of the early R&D and marketing efforts for PLATO, especially in the education marketplace.”
Glish was sitting at one of the PLATO terminals preparing for the board demos when a show coordinator tapped on his shoulder. “Have you got a minute?” the person asked him. “I’ve got somebody here who’s interested to find out about this, I’m told that you’re one of the main demonstrators of the stuff.”
“Well, I’m not here to demonstrate,” Glish replied. “I’m here to get the award, but sure, I’m always on call, and ready to show anybody anything.”
Into the room walked none other than Mike Wallace from 60 Minutes. Wallace was the guest speaker for this awards ceremony, and as he watched Glish’s demo, he asked, true to form, probing questions, “giving me the third degree,” says Glish, who says the conversation went like this:
WALLACE: Well, do you think this is really going to be the solution to education? You really think this can help? Do you really think this technology can replace the teacher?
GLISH: I’m not here to debate the merits of computer-based education, all I’m here to do is show you the technology, and I can tell you from experience that people like American Airlines and this, that, and the other company are us
ing it.
WALLACE [aghast]: You mean, I’m going to get in an airplane tonight and somebody who sat in front of a computer terminal instead of flying is going to be piloting that airplane?
“I couldn’t say one thing,” Glish recalls, “without him coming back with this very antagonistic, leading question, to which there really is no good answer. It’s like, ‘Do you beat your wife?’ It was really quite an experience….I think it was his first exposure to the PLATO system.” It made enough of an impression on Wallace that he spread the word back at CBS, and eventually, Stubbs says, CBS News did a short, unmemorable feature on PLATO that did little to change the system’s general invisibility to the mainstream public.
In actuality, both American Airlines and United Airlines successfully used PLATO for pilot training, a fact that CDC touted in its sales literature frequently. For years, Boeing 767 pilots in the 1980s sat in front of PLATO terminals for a part of their training. They still utilized full-scale, multimillion-dollar, full-motion cockpit flight simulators, and actual flying, of course, but PLATO played a key role in teaching the pilots how to use the various instruments and readouts on the then-new jet.
Another group that benefited from PLATO was the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). When President Ronald Reagan fired the striking members of the air traffic controllers union in 1981, the FAA was suddenly forced to hire a large number of new personnel and train them as quickly and effectively as possible on air traffic control so the skies would continue to be safe for travel. CDC swept in and sold the FAA a PLATO system and a large bank of terminals that were installed at its main Oklahoma City facility to train the new controllers. The program was so successful—and the FAA’s budget was so tight—that the aging CYBER computer (and the formerly white terminals, yellowing over time under years of fluorescent light) was still running TUTOR lessons twenty years later, well into the 2000s. Some of the original courseware developers would over the years retire only to be rehired by a desperate FAA needing them to fix or update the lessons they’d developed years earlier—since TUTOR programmers had become scarce.