Prose. In the dawn of cyberculture. As a few housekeeping rules please silence your devices we are recording the presentation. We want to hear everyones question so please just come to the microphone. Also everybody at the event staff. In finding multiple companies and experienced in the field and for the automatic teaching operations. It is chat rooms and instant messaging create a cyberculture. To build the Publishers Weekly offers a life the portrait from that basic technological innovation so now i turn your attention to our guest the 17 b17. [applause] i am honored here at politics prose i have to say i am a gigantic fan. The first time i have been here but i have been watching the events in this bookstore for at least two decades through booktv and i feel i know the place backwards and forwards. So it is kind of appropriate today is cybermonday because the computer that i will speak about ran on a very large beast called the cyber. And that cyberculture and that wasnt turned into a term but remarkably as we will talk about kept classified in a way it is so unknown. So the way i organize a talk about the title of the book the untold story of cyberculture there are four teams in the title. With the gradual understanding and now we know something more about this stuff. Imagine rearranging the title due to the discussion tonight. And then to talk about the friendly orange glow and then on the dawn of cyberculture. And then time for question and answer. So what does this say . So the real tongue twister term was coined in 1960. So that vision of plato only a few years when those mechanical machines were starting to be built at harvard and other places. And we should try to use a computer it is much more efficient. There were three catalyst in part one are three parts of the book part two is the fund that they had and part three is getting skill. And what are the factors that led to that . And then to blow everything down. As a behavioral psychologist with ill repute depending how you look at them at Harvard University who had seen his daughters class in 1953 and cannot believe what he to all of us completely routine and boring and mom mundane. Walking up and down the aisles and then the students are asked to solve the math problem and she is checking peoples work. But that is what drives him crazy because this is an efficient. But every student should be able to finish whenever they want and not have to wait for the rest of the students. Within a few days he started to build with cutout folders of prototype of the teaching box and then had perfected that add a major conference and it operated like a primitive scrolling player piano. As you go through the answers were encoded on the paper the question could appear to say what is three plus two . Then indicating the answer is five. If you pull this slider straight out of a slot machine you move to the next question. There was a gigantic leap. To go from a nurturing human teacher to a box with scrolling paper to do everything that a teacher can and should do. But yet everyone thought what a great idea. We had the idea with dinner. When sputnik orbited the earth. You can imagine if that happened today you can scroll cnn and fox all day. That is all they talked about four months and months the nation was in a panic or near one but clearly the soviets is math and science. Or the stem classes. So the government very quickly formed nasa and created a massive new act legislation. That meant here is a bunch of money lots of schools and universities said we will improve education. The third catalyst was the arrival of Digital Computers to become commercially available and by 1960 we were starting to be all over the place. Within every month they were doubling. The university of illinois saw this as an opportunity to be of great educational import. They had that skepticism not that. Unadulterated vision but the plato people the skinner idea to literally translate all of those ideas to the computer. Basically that started arriving. The book goes into much more detail but all of this is driven by a vision looking at any tech project apple or google or snapchat or ebay or microsoft or apple going back in time everyone of the Tech Companies has a vision. Usually something that is a reaction to what exists already. The attitude is we can do it better smarter faster cheaper with a combination and plato was no different. Just like the jet airplane that was a reaction to the Wright Brothers but this pattern and is something i am fascinated by. I would argue facebook could not have existed without myspace and probably that would not have existed google had no reason to exist without being a reaction to the inadequacies of altavista if you ring a bell. From the 90s that is so weird. So the vision was to build this responsive system that they have to be immediate feedback you dont want a child to sit there waiting for the rest of the class. So with the computer the idea is that is easy. It turned out it wasnt but it was the bulletproof mandate of the plato philosophy of a project to make sure it was insanely responsive and as we will see there were some surprises that came with that. So further, we will build the most flexible computer platform ever imagined sit down and compose lessons, tutorials, assimilation whatever is appropriate to deploy to their students and all will be good. This drove with the passion and clarity of the Apollo Mission kennedy gave his famous speech a few months after the project started in the optimism surely we can build a computer to teach any student in the united states. If you open any newspaper or magazine today about educational technologies. School board debate all the time. Should we spend millions . During the plato era is of her of modern technology. But the definition was that technology that educates. That is very different than what pot passes for Technology Today which is how do we spend millions to teach the how to tweet or use facebook in the educational setting . And in other words it is it for schools and universities. There isnt much teaching to the system but with those competitors the ideas that we will teach and the teacher doesnt have to do the teaching. It was a controversial idea. So now moving onto the untold story i was tempted not to include it but then i thought it would and up in the novel section. But in this case i think it is about as accurate and be well daring as you can imagine no books or magazines or documentaries or 60 minute segments never a big wired cover story according to Silicon Valley so this has created a challenge and doing a history of something that nobody has ever written anything. So it took 30 plus years doing those Interview Transcripts that is the only way to get that source material. But there is a difference between history and journalism i am certainly not that. And with that story being so fresh and recent this was in keeping with those practices so to figure out what the story was but one thing to think about bills in derby and a champagne small town literally and i land. Five minutes in any direction of cornfields but even at the university of illinois it is arguable that there is one that is more than plato. And that is fictional. Invented in urbana illinois. Urbana illinois. The birth and i went to one of them the greek guy . He is down the hall with philosophy. So this is what we have been up against. So to address this untold story a huge factor in this book as an effort to solve a mystery what the heck is plato have a wideeyed vision and doing all day long. So imagine a small group today probably jet airplane hundreds of miles for a cast aircraft over the North Carolina and dunes. The story of plato so far ahead of its time may strike you just as impossible as the 1h century jet. A story of inventors and mavericks and visionaries came together in the heart of the midwest that it may make you wonder how could this have happened . The Museum Displays why has this story gone untold . Why do we only find out about it now . You celebrate the accomplishments of the Research Center which intern brought those Macintosh Computers with the legions of Startup Companies to that shocking sure and in the history of how we reach this feature to analyze or disseminate their legend set in stone. No longer outcast or ridicule among those millionaires or billionaires but there is the equally long list to fill the pages of this book and its history have been ignored but how recently that happened but more important it was a culture online formed on its own customs and idioms with those computing and social media online communities games and education without wondrous technology as quietly as they had arrived leading behind scraps of legend. As a result of the effort to capture before it finishes completely like someone has a fortune to come of age and to get to know the people there that they all recognize and use. This is a biography is a vision behind the people. Whether the steam engine or the light bulbs airplane with the model t and at its core had a vision. For now moving onto part three so now trying to explain the friendly orange glow. Its not my term. From those plato people i guess the term is about the friendly orange glow. The very first time i saw him i was walking through the campus with brandnew freshman and did not know anything because they resolve this orange reflection on peoples faces with headphones looking at very High Resolution screen that with all orange graphics. And they are clearly hearing them in their headphones. When a priest comes out to take the card to run it through a job and then you get the output with this graphical orange computer that is the first of my had thought i had no idea what it was. Why those display is that project and in some ways it is a sad story because it is simply took too long to get out to production and if you ever heard of Silicon Valley that made trillions of dollars with the cost of computer chips is dramatic and the speed of the processing is doubling every year. Basically has stayed straight it is him believable. So that plato project needed to come up with the display for the students at those terminals this is what this was all about because it was insanely expensive so just to give you an idea it was two dollars per bit. There are eight bits in a byte most of you have a smart phone with you with 16 gigabytes may be 64. Youre talking about device costing 500 million each. And to need computer memory to and to need computer memory to that that would cost 500,000 for minimal memory per terminal, per student. And in the schools they cannot even afford chalk where do they cough up 500,000 for thousand dollars for each student . The numbers do not add up. Engineers speaking engineers to see an opportunity rather than a problem that is a fundamental patent that ironically the press immediately saw the future at the plato people did not. They invented a flatpanel display one quarter of an inch thick filled with neon gas it was a plasma display that later became Plasma Television the same invention. Maybe there is one hanging on the wall here