Transcripts For CSPAN2 Brian Dear The Friendly Orange Glow 20180222

[inaudible conversations] my name is brian dear and im on the stature of politics and prose. Like to thankk everyone for coming to the store. We have brian dear in his book the friendly orange glow the untold story of the before it turned over to the author himself i have a fewew housekeeping notes. Recording the presentation of our web site and it would be distracting. Speaking of the recording everyones questions during the questionandanswer portion so please come to the mic right over here on my last for tonight. Also if i could ask everyone to pull the pictures when the event is over that would be a big help help. Now to our guest brian dear. He is founded multiple companies companies. He has written for applications such as Educational Technology and the san diego research. His experience in the field computerbased education. Plato and its engineers shaped the early digital ages and influence with chart rooms instant messaging emoticons creating a culture the veryy beginning. The the friendly orange glow is an eyeopening historyg. Publishers weekly calls it a history offers a portrait managing creativity that the network row can unleash. I will now turn your attention to brian dear. [applause] c thank you everyone for coming. Im really honored to be here and thanks to politics and prose bookstore with which i have to say im a gigantic fan. Even though this is the first time ive been to the store ive beens watching the events in ts bookstore for at least two decades through booktv and cspan and i feel like i know the place back and forth but i recognize that spot anywhere for the different sections of the book. Its kind of appropriate that today is cyber monday because the plato computer about which im going to speak ran on a very large cyber and in the plato era cyber culture meant plato culture and it hadnt really been turned in a term that meant anything else but that. Remarkably as well talk about in more detail tonight this entire story has been almost kept classified in a way. So when no and we will goes into that in a bit. The way i organize this talk was to first think about the title of the book. Just to rehash that the friendly orange glow the untold story of the plato system and the don of cyber culture. There are basic way for themes in thatt title. What i found helps people sort of game a gradual understanding so we now know something a little bitt more about all this stuff is to actually imagine rearranging the title a little bit and thats how i will do tonights discussion. It will start with the plato system and then we will talk storywhy is it in untold and then well talk about the glow and whate that is. Then we will spend a lot of time on the don of cyber culture. Then we will have time for questions andrcrc answers. Lets dive right in and talk about the plato system. What is this thing . As we heard in the introduction the acronym stands for Program Logic or p automatic teaching operations which is a real tongue twister. The term was coined in the 1960s so this goes way, way, way back. Basically the idea, the vision of plato back in 1960 only a few years after mechanical machines were starting to be built at harvard and some other places to attempt to teach subjects to students particularly Grade School Kids and also some college students. A computer bec be much more efficient and more flexible. They were really three catalysts. Part of the book, there are three parts of the book. Part one is automatic teacher, part two is the phone that they had. And part three is getting to scale. Part one is really the origins of plato and what are the factors that led to it. And theres really three catalysts that i think you can sort of boil everything down to. One is bf skinner who was perhaps it will refute depends on how you look at him. At harvard university. Who had seen his daughters arithmetic class in 1953. This is how i open the book in this scene. He is sitting there and he just cannot believe what he sees. When he sees is to all of us, im absolutely sure, completely routine and boring and mundane. He sees the teacher walking up and down the aisles of a little classroom with 20 boys and girls. They are all in fourth grade in a math class. She is writing problems on the board and students are asked to solve the math problems and she is Walking Around checking peoples work. And pausing here and they are not part that sort of thing. And some students finish before others and that is what drives them crazy. He says this is inefficient. It is not as systematic as it could be. Not as easy as it could be. Every student should be able to finish whenever they want and not have to wait for the rest of the students. And you know, he then ran back to his office and within a few days he started building with cut out manila folders, a prototype of a teaching box you might call it. And within a few months, he had sort of perfected it, presented it at a major conference and it kind of operated like a primitive scrolling piano might. With little holes on a scroll paper and as he went through the answers were encoded on the paper and they question might appear in a tiny box saying what is 3 2 . And you have to move some sliders and indicate the answer is five. If you answered for you cannot move forward. If you answered six you cannot move forward. If you answered five, you pulled a spider right out of a slot machine i am sure. And then you can move to the next question which is, what is 4. 5 kenseth 4 5 or something . There was a gigantic leap. If you think about it for a moment it really takes a gigantic leap to go from a nurturing, human teacher to a box with scrolling paper inside. Which is supposed to be doing everything that a teacher can and should do to educate american children. Nationwide. And yet, everyone thought what a great idea. So another catalyst, we had the idea with skinner. Where did the money come from . The money came from in 1957 it was the soviet union launched sputnik. The first settlement to orbit the earth. When that happened, everyone freaked out. You can imagine if it happened today you would see scrolling at the bottom of cnn and fox and everything else. All day all of the pundits talking about it. That is all they talked about for months and months. The nation was either in a panic or near one and something had to be done clearly the soviets had beat us up because they are better educated, they know math and science better. But today we would call stem. Science, technology, engineering, math. And so the government very quickly formed nasa. It forms the Defense Department advanced Research Projects agency and if funded and created a massive new active legislation called the National Defense of education act. Which basically meant here is a whole bunch of money, who wants it . And lots of schools, lots of universities, lots of businesses wanted it and said we will try to improve education. And the third catalyst with the arrival and the imminent availability of Digital Computers which started really finally becoming commercially available in the late 50s and by 1961 plato started, we were starting to be all over the place which meant there were 20 of them instead of two of them. Within every month there were probably doubling. The university of illinois saw this as an opportunity to get into a major project that would be of great educational importance. They viewed this as a pure experiment. At least they had that skepticism. I dont think they have the pure unadulterated vision that skinner had. He really drank the koolaid and his approach was the way to go. The plato people, used the skinner ideas i think as a launchpad rather than as we are going to literally translate all of those ideas to the computer. So that is basically how things started arriving. Part one of the book was much more detailed about that. But basically all of this has been driven by a vision. If you look at any tech project where there is apple, google, facebook, snapchat. You know microsoft, apple, going all the way back in time every one of these Tech Companies has a vision. In basically every Technology Project starts with a vision. It usually is something that is a reaction to something and the attitude is, we can do a better, smarter, cheaper, faster. Something like that. Some combination or all of them. Plato was no different. Even that was 1960 was no different. And just like the jet airplane was a reaction to propeller airplanes, which is probably reaction to wilbur and orville wright. This pattern just continues. It is very predictable and that is something im very fascinated by. For example, you see that i would argue that facebook would never have existed without myspace. And myspace probably would not have existed without google had reason to exist without for being a reaction to say the inadequacies of other companies. So the plato vision was to build this responsive system. One of the rules of skinner was things have to be immediate. The feedback has to be immediate. He did not want to have a little child sitting there finishing up all of there problems and waiting for the rest of the class. So, with a computer, the idea was that is actually easy. Turned out it was not easy but it became one of the imperative underlying bulletproof mandate of the plato philosophy i guess. The computer plato philosophy. The project to make sure the system was insanely responsive. And as we will see, there were surprises that came with that that picked up all of part two of the book. Further, this vision really was about, we will build the greatest most flexible computer platform ever imagined that any teacher without any training will be able to sit down and compose whatever interactive lessons tutorials, simulations, games, educational games, whatever is appropriate for the students they will build and they will deploy to their students and all will be good. And this drove the vision with the passion and clarity i would argue of the apollo mission. All during the 60s. I think its interesting that kennedy gave his famous speech and 61. A few months after plaintiffs project started. And the optimism of that era. We can get thomas and when that surely we can build a computer that can basically teach any student in the United States. Self you may hear the phrase in the open a newspaper or magazine today would just browse around social media, youll hear about Educational Technology as a phrase. You hear schools talk about all the time, School Boards debate this all the time. Should we spend more millions on it . What is it . That kind of thing. The thing you need to understand is just plato era, corrective modern Educational Technology, the idea, the definition or thinking was that Educational Technology means technology that educates. And i think that is very different than a letter what is today. Which is more how do we spend millions to teach students how to tweet or use facebook in an educational setting for use Google Searches an email and all of the capabilities of google or whatever company is offering the service to the school district. In other words, it is basically information technology. It is it for schools and universities. And there isnt anywhere near as much teaching the system but back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, with the mission of plato and competitors plato, the idea was that we will teach with this system and the teacher doesnt have to do the teaching. It was a pretty revolutionary and controversial idea. Lets move onto the untold story. It is a very trite expression. There are thousands birth titles i have that is the subtitle. I was tempted not to include and just for the book friendly orange glow but i think it would end up in the novels section in the bookstore. Which might not have been a bad idea but in this case, even those it is an expression, i think it is about as accurate and bewilderingly accurate as you can imagine. Because there are no books, magazines, movies, documentaries, 60 minute segments, no programs that you have ever seen on plato anywhere. Theres never been a big wire cover story or even a back cover story or a middle of the story. According to Silicon Valley plato basically does exist and that is all well and good as it should be. So, this has created a challenge for an author who is writing a book about plato. Because usually when you try to do a history of something go to the sources and as the first step and you read what everybody else has written and the problem is no one else has written anything on plato. So i had to go around and it should be everybody. And it took about 30 years. And i did 7 Million Words and Interview Transcripts that attacked myself. That took a few years. It was the only way to get source material to go talk to the people and luckily they were still around. That gets to an interesting issue which you dont really have time to talk about tonight but there is a defense between history and journalism when youre trying to dig up a story. And some people describe me as a historian and i am certainly not that. I mean i do not have the training. I have read a lot of history but i think with plato story being so fresh and recent in the majority people still around, still alive, still on email and phones, this was more in keeping with the journalism profession or practices. So i approach this with a little bit of both. I did talk to everybody and try to figure out what the story was good that took a few years also. One thing to think about, the plato system was developed at the university of illinois in urbanachampaign. Which is a small town surrounded by many miles of corn. Literally. It is an island in green, you go there in the summer and youll see what im talking about. Five minutes in any direction and youre surrounded by cornfields. 10 feet high. What ive always been blown away by with plato is in fact the event university of illinois think it is arguable that there is another computer that is more famous than plato. It is from the movie 2001. And that is fictional. It was quote unquote from illinois if you watch the movie or read the book. But there are events where they celebrate the birth of how in urbana. And i went you know, to one of them. And im going around saying but what about plato . And they are like what . Who . The greek guy . He is down the hall in philosophy. So this is the kind of thing weve been up against in trying to document the history of leader. Read some things and skip around and keep things moving but i will try to adjust this untold story thing because it really is a huge factory in this book. It is kind of like this book was an effort to solve the mystery and the mystery was, what the heck is plato and why do the people who experienced it have this wideeyed vision like we saw the future before any of you guys. In the future being what everyone is doing now which is this all day long. We were all staring at the screen 40 years ago. Imagine discovering that a small group of people had invented a fully functioning jet airplane capable of flying Long Distances at hundreds of miles an hour, decades before the Wright Brothers cast their fragile craft into the wind for 12 seconds over North Carolina sand dunes and 1903. Imagine how such a discovery would disrupt the common understanding of history. The story of plato, a Computer System so far ahead of its time in perhaps the least nonmajor 20thcentury Technology Project may strike you as just as impossible at a story as the 19th century but plato really happened. It is great inventors hackers, geniuses and those that came it may make you wonder if it has made this author wonder, how could this have happened . Where are the books . The magazine articles, documentaries, Museum Displays that should have covered the story . Why has this done untold . Why are we only finding out about it now . We celebrate the rise of the internet, the world wide web, celebrate the accompaniments of xerox, a Research Center which in turn inspired apples macintosh computers. In environments we still use today. We celebrate with legions of start up companies and placed into the hands of millions now billions of people. Innovations have changed the world. Innovations people cannot imagine living without. We are living the very shocking future that warned us about 45 years ago. In the history of how we reach this feature has been researched, deciphered, studied, organized and disseminated far and wide long enough that the stories become legends, set in stone. Nerds, geeks and hackers are no longer indolent. Here they are sought after leaders. Many counted among the tens of thousands of recent millionaires and hundreds of billionaires. The lesson heroes names in the computer revolution quote unquote is long. There is an equally long list of unknown computer pioneers. The people whose stories fill pages of this book. The level to which plato, its people and its history have been ignored is extraordinary given not only have seminal the innovations were and how your Online Community flurries but have recently happened. Plato it is a Computer System with a culture. Physical and online. A community that form that is on with its own jargon. Customs and idioms. A cast thousands, a world familiar to us. Yet suddenly foreign. An entire area that clashes with the history of computing social media online communities, online games and online education. It is as if an advanced civilization that was scribed on earth dwelt among us both a wondrous technology and then disappeared as quietly as they had arrived. Leaving behind scraps of legend and artifacts only if you noticed. This book is the result of an effort to capture the history of the lost culture of innovation before it vanishes completely. Someone who had the Great Fortune to come of age and become digital. As it were within that very culture. Thereby having a chance to get to know some of the people there, their stories, revisions and amazing technologies. Technologies that we all now recognize and use. This book is also as much a biography of a vision as it is a story behind the people of plato. Every Technology Story whether it is about steam engine, textile, telephone, airplane or more recently, macintosh, Google Search engine or tesla electric cars. At its core has a vision. And so, moving on to part three. The friendly orange glow. Trying to explain what that is all about. It is not my term. I did not make it up. I love the term but it wasnt me. It was something that i heard all the time from plato people. And when i interviewed all the people all the time they waited i guess the term is rhapsodic about the friendly orange glow. I will say the very first time i saw plato at the university of delaware in 1979 i was in the music building. Im wondering through the campus and i was a brandnew freshman i didnt know anything. I see this darkened classroom in the music building. Except theres all this orange reflection on peoples faces. And then headphones on. And they are looking at very High Resolution screens and are all orange graphics and its all musical notation on top youre just as beautiful as on a sheet music. In the bottom half of the screen is a keyboard and people are reaching out and play notes and clearly hearing them in their headphones. That is not usually heard about what computers look usually is a stack of cards and he stuffed them into a reader and it is someplace somewhere that comes out and choose your way and they take the card and run it through a job and maybe a few days later the output which is all there is all errors. You have to start over again. So heres this computer and i am helped. That was the first, so that appeared and had no idea what it was. The story behind why plato display is orange is really remarkable. And it consumes a lot of the projects benches described in part one of the book. In some ways it is a sad story because i think it simply took too long to get out to production. And if you have ever had this thing called moores law which Silicon Valley has made trillions of dollars by. It basically says the cost of chips, computer chips is dramatically falling every year. And the speed of the processing is dramatically doubling every year. And that is basically straight all the way until 2017. Since like 1965. It is unbelievable. In the meantime, the plato project needs to come up with a display. For many students to use. At the terminals that they were going to interact with this teacher system. Thats what this was about, education. The problem was that computer memory in 1960, 61 and 62 is insanely expensive. To give you an idea just how expensive, it was basically two dollars per bit. There are eight bits in one bite. And most of you probably have a smart phone with you probably have 16 gigabytes or 32. You know whatever android or apple whatever. 64 may be. You are talking about a device in 1962 wouldve cost Something Like 500 million. Each and you would need computer memory to run every display terminal that was going to be on the system. I would have cost about 500,000 for a minimal amount of memory per terminal, per student and you can imagine in schools where teachers can afford truck for the chalkboard, where will they pop up 500,000 per terminal for each student . The numbers just did not add up. Engineers being engineered they saw this as an opportunity rather than a problem. That they can go in the event something. What they came up with was really a fundamental patent from the 1960s that ironically, the press immediately sought with the future was an the plato people didnt. Basically, they invented a flat Panel Display there was 1 4 of an inch thick, filled with neon gas and it was the plasma display that would later become plasma televisions. The same invention. There may be one hanging on the wall here i dont know. But many homes have them. As early as the mid 60s, the meeting would come down to illinois and interview the scientists and look at single pixel that they were experimenting on at that point. Just one dad. Trying to perfect that. And they would say youre building a flatscreen t. V. this is the future for the future is flat television. We get it and of course the plato people, its education. And then you know the media people say no, it is television. That is what it takes to have a really focused mission, critical vision. They stuck with it. They were building this education. And not for entertainment. As we will say for the idea did not last very long. By the time the early 70s, very early 70s six may 2, 1956 very primitive four inch by four inch screen prototype. Had this in a box that the engineers nicknames the possum trap. And they brought this to washington d. C. To present the National Science foundation to get big funding to roll this out commercially or will not commercially but in a major multimillion dollar experiment. At the university of illinois and then surrounding geographical area of chicago. And let me read to you the same from that demo because it is, a classic technology demo. Now, it starts by saying cerl is the name of the lab. The computerbased Education Research lab. Cerl engineering technicians jim and ray have been tasked with taking one of the four inch prototype plasma panels and incorporating into a fullsized plywood mockup of the plato for the demo. It had a lid on the top of the box that you can open but you had to be careful fiddling about inside. We call it the possum trap. It was accrued is possible to get your hands card and if youre not careful. Maybe her hands cut off. The technicians carefully set up big blue county possum trap terminal on the table with cables and have life connection up and running. Which is remarkable this is about 71 and they are doing a live Long Distance telephone connection all the way back to the cerl computer which is about 1200 miles away. This was not normal in 1974 71. It was perfectly normal in the word of plato though. They did demos all over the world. Everything worked fine. During the test. Then just as were about to make the presentation, just before we had difficulty with the phone lines, then the plasma display did not light. Moments before the demo was about to start, the Electronics Inside the terminal was so extremely delicate that they had doubts about the possum trap would survive the trip out to washington but had made it. And they had taken great care to gently set up everything. Now it was not working, seconds before the founder of plato, he was a shaman and did all of the demos. It was about to start. He assessed the situation and did what any leader of a Technology Project does when hes about to go on with demonstration that will determine whether his project gets funding from the United States government or not. He took his hand and slammed the side of the possum trap hard. My heart went into my throat he says when he slammed the side of the box which again was so sensitive. But by some miracle, the whole thing lit up with text on the screen and the phone line came through and we were ready for the demonstration. And that was pretty much the way things went with plato demos. Just one quick comment. They really did build these big bulky terminals that were the size of small washing machines. And they really did have microfiche slide projectors in them. You have to understand that a flatpanel gas plasma displays a sheet of glass basically. It is only 1 4 of an inch thick. And it is transparent. So there were mirrors behind in the terminal and at the top there was a slide projector. You could project color photos from slides and put onto a microfiche plastic sheet. And that he superimpose text and graphics on top of that. It was the best of both worlds in terms of fairly rich multimedia environment for the early 70s. There wasnt video, we did not have that yet but this was pretty darn impressive. And to add to the set up, the slide mechanism ran on compressed air. Which meant that he would have to cart around a huge table of compressed air to the demos. And of course, airlines eventually caught on that is not a good thing to do. Not a good thing to transport you now, what exactly is it not to, sir . So eventually, they had to bring some kid along that was on top of the basketball and provide the necessary pressure. So, lets move on to the dawn of cyberculture. The first thing to really think about is culture. The cerl laboratory was a special place. None of this wouldve never happened. I would not be standing here, the book would never have been written had not the culture of this laboratory been so unusual and so special. And unusual in the sense that computer labs in the 60s and 70s were often locked up places that you were not allowed in. And you basically better be wearing a lab coat nba dock if youre going to have access. Even in places like mit and stanford, things like that. There labs are legendary but they were generally restricted and it was hard to get into. The lab at cerl was notorious for being so open. And the management so loose that people joked that there really was no management and there was no restrictions on who can just wander into the building. And that led to some very interesting things. There was a philosophy behind it that i discovered. Which is, remarkable then and totally applicable now i think. He felt he ran the lab from bitzer on downs welcomed anyone any gender, any age. If you were a kid and you showed interest and promise and determination. You are a pest and he kept coming back, they would put you to work. They would say if youre not going to go away, try this. Go solve this problem. And if you can solve that will give you another problem. And they would repeat, repeat, repeat. Eventually they would say youre solving a lot of problems. Do you want to get paid . A lot of kids would say, i can get paid to have fun . Who needs a degree . That was another problem. [laughter] and so, we found during the 60s and in a title with an early 70s was, word got out all over urbana that cerl was a cool place to be. It had the school arent computers and it was the home of the orange glow basically. And people would wander in from all over town. Particularly across the street where a Laboratory School run by the university, those kids had it lucky because they were literally from the door of cerl and they wandered in all the time. I document the stories of the number of those kids because they became incredibly instrumental in building some of the most famous features of plato. Part two of this book dives deep into this whole area of how i guess you can call this the Youth Culture took over plato and whats ironic is that plato again was this thing about education. We are going to build a teacher out of machine and that was what will teach students for now we are discovering that the students are like, your teaching machine is very cold but theres a lot more you can do with this thing. And they ironically started teaching the adults when you can do. And for most of part two in the book i just go through a remarkable series of innovations that they brought to the system on their own. These were mostly like teenagers. Some of them are not even in college. And and and amazing. , i told him. Between 73 and 74, he suddenly saw a chat room, instant messaging, message forms, email, massive multiplayer games. Basically, the original dna for almost everything you see now. It was formulated then. I love the visual Design Elements that people write phd is about and presentday videogames were all present on plato in the early 70s. And what is also remarkable, i was talking about the fact that a lot of Times Technology is created in response to the inadequacy of previous technologies. In this case, there were not a lot of predecessors today kind of social computing capabilities that these kids brought. They just wanted to hang out and be online with their friends. And you know, it was like there was a previous system that the visit and they had all seen it and used it. This was literally novel. There were no books, magazines or anything. No predecessors at all. One person told me a great quote. Which im trying to draw from memory so i may not get this exactly. It is in the book where basically they thought they had built the worlds greatest educational teaching machine. But in fact what they had built was the worlds greatest pinball machine ever built. And it was really ironic how over the course of the 70s and into the 80s, so many students both in high school and in college, would be exposed to plato. Which by then, had many thousands and thousands of hours of lessons available on subjects from anthropology and zoology. And everything in between. The sciences, the humanities, literature, french, latin, russian, hebrew. All kinds of amazing tutorial simulations that were still remarkable to this day. Ironically, for many kids, not the majority but for many of them, the most interesting topic on plato was plato. And they wanted to know how they can bend and shape it and transform it. And ironically again, often times with that link she was down either dropping out of school or being forced to leave school because their grades plummeted to zero. And even that turned out to not be such a bad thing. Which in a way is a precursor to what would happen many years later. With Silicon Valley coming in and just plucking kids out of Computer Science classes and freshman year at stanford or mit. And joining google or whatever. Kids got the message real quick that why joining this full degree if i can be making six figures by age 20 . And there is also the story of steve jobs and bill gates and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest they dropped out of school and went off to become billionaires. So there was a pattern and a more. Interestingly with the plato era, there was not these draw of money. There wasnt the spell of riches that could pour in you the way so many people sort of take the internet today. It is almost like a gold rush. It is perpetual. We do not have that. I did not see that when i was exposed to plato. And so the commercial sort of mercantile side of the social computing revolution had not happened yet. Speaking of revelation, i use this book to put somewhat of a historian hat on. I sort of have a challenge for real historians. Which is, find prior examples where Something Like plato existed and where i would cite the evidence, the copious evidence that i have accumulated in this book. As evidence that the social interpersonal computer revolution was thriving. Not only started but was thriving before the personal computer revolution ever got started. And that is basically historical heresy. He heard it here first tonight. But i argue that it is just, talk to the people. Go look at the evidence. What you had on plato in the early 70s. The error when the founders of google were in diapers. And apple in microsoft had several years to go before they would even be incorporated. And those kids were still teenagers. We had was a thriving, mature online world. People completely addicted to the system. Ironically, the plato system moved in phases. Plato one, two, three and four. With roman numerals. Plato one was 60, number 261, plato there was 63 and lasted until about 71. Then plato four was a big deal. For many it wasnt plato four he was plato iv like intravenous. Because i think people get addicted and spend way too much of their lives online today. A read a little passage that i think will help describe this phenomenon. Before i do i want to mention, when experienced i remember vividly from being at the university of delaware and freshman year. I had some friends come up to visit. They were from high school and it was the first time in delaware. Of course i had to, youve got to see the plato system is the future, it is orange and they are like, whatever. So, i drag him into a classroom in them showing this thing. And for years ive been trying to describe what it felt like to me to try and show this thing with enthusiasm to my friends. And i finally figured it out. It is probably something that everyone here can relate to. That is, have you ever tried to get your pet to watch television . In other words, get your dog to save them in the screen. And they will look at the screen for a minute. With a blank expression and for a cartoonish character, the odds of have the swirls you know like that. And then a squirrel. Theyre not seeing it. They dont get it. I kind of had the impression that it was the way it was. You know here the future, this is what we will all be doing and in 10 or 20 years and it is already here chat rooms. You can instant message people, you can do screen sharing. You dont even know what it is but it is cool and it was kind of like, when are we going for beer . So one way i described this in the book is as follows. Only a few minutes exposure of plato for was enough for people to know that upended the room seemed view of computers at that point. If one were to accept help books media and books have betrayed them. Plato was an evil Software Intelligence first seemingly benign but after something goes horribly wrong, now bent on destroying humanity. It almost certainly was not 2001 looking back through you, through a four boarding round red glass eye. No longer was it some boring found in government agencies. It was your friend. Looking back at you. Differently orange dots. And i also described it, which i will paraphrase the interest of time. But imagine in the 70s, if you are having dinner with the family and you happen to casually mention, today i chatted with people in hawaii, new york, illinois and delaware. They look at you with great horror because of the phone bill costs. And then you explain no, this was through term talk on plato. And they are like what . They have to spend the next hour painstakingly explaining what it means to chat with someone online. And why it is actually an interesting thing to do. And why it is fun. And besides the fact that it is free. And by the time dinner is over most of the family had run for the hills and not been around the table. Contrast that with today. If the family is even sitting around the same table at dinner, they are probably all sitting there with one fork in one hand and a smart phone or a tablet in the other. Everyone individually immersed in their own private online world chatting or talking with friends and reading newsfeeds. And oblivious to the issues, concerns or discussions going on from anyone else around the table. And what they are doing is essentially equivalent of everything people were doing socially online on plato in the 70s. And you know, today they would not bat an eye if you said i just chatted with someone hawaii or Something Like that. Back then it was a major dissertation to try and explain. So, one other way i described this, what these teenagers really did was create what Silicon Valley pendants were much later call the killer app. Which is always been defined or the simplest way ive always defined as people. In other words, the most powerful compelling application sees all this fancy technology is just to connect people together. All of the rest is just noise. But what people really use computers for nowadays is finding out where people are going, what they are doing, what theyre thinking, what their opinions are and that sort of thing. Good, bad or ugly. One thing weve all learned is that the technology has scaled and so has the good, the bad and the ugly. Which is something we can talk about. So, i cannot really time to run into this and what part number three but basically what part three is about is this dream of getting all of this Educational Technology to scale. And it is the same dream that every startup has today. We have an idea in the garage. For the Kitchen Table with your laptop or whatever. We get a couple of collaborators together, do a startup company, maybe get some funding. Maybe get some traction. There are a lot of maybes but that is how it works. And maybe you go viral and maybe get to scale and scale nowadays is a few billion people. We are long past if you thousand door a few even tens of millions. When i was doing my startups having 20 Million People was considered amazing. Now it is considered to be very concerned about. I will briefly mention that the university of illinois did something incredibly daring which had never been done before. That was in the series of first and pioneering efforts, they decided to license all of the technology that builds to a commercial company. And the nsf was in horror. The university is like what . In the lab was like even they cannot quite understand it. And yet after two years of lawyers they pulled it off. In 1976 plato was essentially sold commercially to a Company Called control data. Which does not exist anymore. Which is about where i will leave it. That is the whole story of control data and the reasons why it did not work or become viable. The Harvard Business School Case Study times 100. And if for no other reason, i urge anyone with any you know, daring or imagining going into a startup were doing some kind of entrepreneurial effort to think about, learn the lessons from control data because they are the classic lessons that are repeated over and over again. With that, when we open this up to questions. [applause] thank you very much for reading. This is a great talk. Thank you. Maybe a few guesses. Why was it unknown . And why is it still unknown . What is the curse . I think one thing. You know i tried to do a start a few years ago in the moviegoing space. Which i learned is defined as the m word in Silicon Valley it even so much as mention moving the Silicon Valley is a completely free, leave the conference room, locked the door, public toxins check to see if you are gone yet. It is not a popular project to dive into. Even though you would think it might be fun. In the plato world, it was the e word for education. Basically i think it is safe to say that education in the United States has never been like a firstclass buzzword. It is second or third class. And as the microcomputer revolution board on in the 70s and 80s and exploded and people started making money and wall street woke up and realized this is the future gold rush, and it is still going on now and moneymaking became really the thing. And the technology, pace of technology accelerated so fast it is still dizzying. The internet rose up, the web runs of, personal computers with formal powerful cameras and anything plato ever had rose up. And plato was Still Mission oriented to the e word. Even though it had all of the stuff. And all of the ingredients. They could have owned the internet. They could have owned personal computing even. And i talked about that in detail in part three. How control data, the engineers built a personal computer in 1975 that did everything that the ibm pc did in 1981. They had a sexier head start. The cdc rule was if you can plug it into the wall, it is too small. And they basically felt that it has to be a mainframe, has cost 10 million and appeared anything smaller than that is not what we do here at control data. And well, they paid the price as the microcomputer revolution going on. Economics for one thing. The fact that it was educational oriented even though all the social stuff was there even though now i think it is documented that it was really the interpersonal computer revolution. Starting before the pc revolution. It was mostly dogs staring at televisions. They just not quite get it. They did not see what it was. Not enough of a Critical Mass appreciated what this dizzying future was going to be. If you think about the 60s, every depiction of computers even star trek, ironically we are getting back to star trek now with the google home and amazon device which you go you know, i will not use the phrase because it will probably trigger devices all of the country but i will say anyway. Google home, order a million copies of the friendly orange glow. [laughter] watch the system crash. But now, is like structure. Computer working. At the distance of this planet. You know, that is nine lightyears or whatever. There was no notion of social with any depiction of computers. Given how the 9000 anything. It was the same thing. Talk to and it was considered futuristic. Unfortunately that is where we are headed. It will be interesting what that does to social. And its great dot this all comes forward because its a book that has been magic and mystery. They do Educational Technology to help people learn and i wonder if any of the technology from the plato world actually came forward to what is used today and learning applications and devices. Based on what i looked around and saw i would say very little which is another tragedy. What i found in years of looking at the field of education and training both k12 University Government and industry is that it is just repeatedly reinvented and a gigantic waste of resources to keep reinventing things. You could type natural language and various scientific equations and whatever, plato just gobbled it up and d you knew what you we talking about. They learned that it has to be very flexible and patient this didnt even with typos and stuff. They still havent been replicated and the other thing i will say is a great addition of plato was to get the system to the point that it was so incredibly flexible anybody just a mere mortal could sit down and create a. It cost of production of interactive Students Learning to come down and not only did it not come down but its gone up every year to produce a big interactive course now is no different then what it cost to o produce a big interactive videogame. The talking 100 million to develop the game that would sell a billion copies or Something Like that. Starting from the age of 11, i spend nights there all the time coming 11, 12, 13. They started recruiting us to teach computer programming. One of the aspects of that culture is that molestation and use of kids. What you said is you did install the stories come. With the need to movement and the book coming out and one of those kids that might end up with one of these molesters. What are the chances of bringing up some of these stories and just letting the parents know about individuals and institutions and where their kids are at risk even today. It is a bulletproof way out to the public. What i found is that it was not happening with the staff. These were peripheral. No one in 20 years of people coming to me. Every Single Person insisted on silence and not mentioning this and everything, so i didnt see a story affair for me to pursue a. They are mentioned in the spotlight because they do exist. Theres not much i can do in my book. Again, it just was not a story that was documented. So theres nothing i can do with it i talked to the lawyers about it and they basically agreed with me. Then it becomes a completely different projects to what pros doing is basically documenting plato first and foremost. What you find when you study a very large group of people in any walk of life there is probably some operators in that group of people that its just human nature and they are going to do bad things. It could completely overwhelm the documents and project that is going on. [applause] i will be sticking around if anybody wants to get a book signed. Thank you. Silicon valley the renaissanc renaissance r9 to 76 there was a big bang in Silicon Valley the most significant and diverse with the past 150 years writes the historian leslie berlin. The Venture Capital and biotechnologies the belly brought to life new Iconic Companies including apple and made the fir