And it would be distracting to have a ring tone sound out. Speaking of the recording, we want to be able to hear everyones questions clearly so please come to the mic on either side or actuallyright over here on my left. Also, if i could ask everyone to take your chairs after it is over, that would be a help to everyone at the event staff at the store. Now to our guest, brian dear. He has founded multiple Companies Like eventful and coconnect computing, written for Educational Technology, and the san diego reader. He is experienced in the field of computerbased education, especially the plato system short for Program Logic for automatic teaching operations. Plato and his engineers shaped the early digital age with its influence. Its chat rooms, emoticons and more created a cyberculture at the beginning. The friendly orange glow is a history of this. Publishers weekly calls it an exuberant history of the energy and creativity that can unleash. It conveys the excitement of technological innovation and the freewheeling eccentricity of the cyber team. Now i would direct your attention to brian dear. [applause] thank you everyone for coming. Im really, really honored to be here and thanks to the politics and prose bookstore of which im a gigantic fan. Even though this is the first time ive ever been to the store, ive been watching the events in this bookstore for at least two decades through tv and cspan and on youtube and i feel like i know the place backwards and forwards. I recognize that font anywhere for the different sections of the books. Its kind of appropriate that today is cyber monday, because the plato computer about which im about to speak ran on a very large beast called thecyber. And in the plato era, cyberculture meant plato culture and it hadnt really been turned into a term that meant anything else but that. And remarkably, as we will talk about in a little more detail tonight, this entire story has been almost classified, in a way. Itsso unknown and we will go into that in a bit. The way i organized this was the first thinkabout the title of the book. So just to rehash that, the friendly orange glow, the untold story of the plato system and the dawn of cyberculture. Theres basically four themes in that title. What i found helps people gain a gradual understanding so we can arrive somewhere in about an hour and we know something a little bit more about all this stuff is to actually imagine rearranging the title a little bit. Thats how i will do tonights discussion we will start with the plato system and then talk about why is it an untold story . Then we will talk about the friendly orange glow and what the heck that is and we will spend a lot of time on the dawn of cyberculture and then we will have time for questions and answers so 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 for automatic teacher in operations whichis a real tongue twister. The term was coined in 1960 so this goes way, way back. Basically, the idea of plato 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 gradeschoolkids and also some college students. The idea was that we should try to use a computer because it would be much more efficient, much more flexible and that sort of thing. There were three catalysts and part one of this book, theres three parts to the book. Part one is the automatic teacher, part two is the fun they had and part three is getting scaled. Part one is really the origins of plato and all the factors that led to it. Theres three catalysts that i think you could boil everything down to. One isbf skinner who is a behavioral psychologist , perhaps of ill repute. Depends on how you look at him. At harvard university, who had seen his daughters arithmetic class in 1953 and this is how i open the book. Hes sitting there and he just cannot believe what he sees. What he sees is to all of us, im absolutely sure, completely routine and boring and just monday. He sees a teacher walking up and down the aisles of a little classroom with 20 boys and girls, all in a math class and shes writing problems on the board and the students are asked to solve the math problems and shes checking peoples work and pausing here and there and that kind of thing. And naturally, some of the students finished before others. Thats what drives skinner crazy. Hes like , this is inefficient. This is not as systematic as it could be and 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. He then ran back to his office and within a few days he started building with cutout manila folders a prototype of a teaching box, you might call it. And within a few months he had sort of perfected it, presented at a major conference and it operated like a primitive scrolling player piano mic with little holes on a scrollof paper and as you went through, the answers were encoded on the paper. The question might appear in a tiny box thing as 3 2 and you have to move sliders and indicate the answer is five and if you answered for, you couldnt move forward. If you answered five, you pulled the slider which is right out of the slotmachine, im sure. Then you can move to the next question which is what is for 5 or something. The way i look at this , there was this gigantic leap because if you think about it even for a moment it 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 g, what a great idea. So anothercatalyst , we had the idea with skinner, where did the money come from . The money came from something that happened in 1957 was the soviet Union Launched Sputnik , the first satellite your and when that happened everyone freaked out and imagined if it happened today, you would see it scrolling at the bottom on cnn and fox all day, all the pundits talking about it. Thats all they talked about for months and months. The nation was either in a panic when youre one and something had to be done. The soviets had beat us out. They are better educated, venal math, they know science better, what we would call stem, science, Technology Engineering and math so the government quickly formed nasa. They formed darpa which is the defense departments advanced Research Projects agency and it created a massive new active legislation called the National Defense of education act which basically meant heres a whole bunch of money , who wants it . Lots of schools, lots of universities, lots of businesses wanted it and said we will try to improve education. The third catalyst was the arrival and the imminent availability of digital computers. Which started really finally becoming commercially available in the late 50s and by 1960 when plato was started were starting to be all over the place which meant there were 20 of them instead of two. But within every month they were probably doubling. The university of illinois saw this as an opportunity to get into a major project that would be a great educational import. They viewed it as a pure experiment, at least they had that skepticism. I dont think they had the pure unadulterated vision that skinner had. Skinner had drunk the koolaid that his approach was the way to go. The plato people used the skinner idea 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 helping, thats when that started arriving. Part one of the book goes into more detail about that but basically all this is driven by a vision and if you look at any tech project whether its apple, google, facebook, snap chat, no matter what is out there today, just like ebay or microsoft, apple, going all the way back in time. Every one of these Tech Companies had a vision and every Technology Project starts with a vision and it usually is something that the reaction to something that exists already. And the attitude is we can do it better, smarter, cheaper, faster, Something Like that and some combination or all of them. Plato was no different. Even though it was 1960, it was no different. Its like the jet airplane was a reaction to propeller airplanes which was probably a reaction to wilbur and orville wright, this pattern continues. Its very predictable and its something im fascinated by. You see that i would argue that facebook would never have existed without myspace and myspace wouldnt have existed without friends turned. Google would never have had reason to exist without being a reaction to the inadequacies of lycos or altavista if any of those names ring a bell from the 90s. 20 years ago, thats so weird. So the plato vision was to build this incredible responsive system because one of the rules of skinner was things have to be immediate. The feedback has to be immediate. You dont want to have a child finishing all their math problems and waiting for the rest of the class. So with a computer, the idea was that easy. It turned out it wasnt easy but it became one of the imperative underlying bulletproof mandates of the plato philosophy, i guess. The computer plato philosophy of the project, to make sure the system was insanely responsive. And as we will see, there were surprises that came with that that take up all of part two of the book. And further, this vision really was about we will build the greatest, most flexible computer format ever imagined that any teacher without any training would be able to sit down and compose whatever interactive lessons, tutorials, simulations, games, educational games, whatever is appropriate to their students, they will build and deploy to their students and all will be good. This drove the vision with the passion and clarity i would argue of the Apollo Mission , all during the 60s and i think its interesting that kennedy gave his famous beach and 61 a few months after platos project started. The optimism of that era, if we can get someone to the moon surely we can build a computer that and basically teach any student in the United States. So you may hear the phrase that if you open a newspaper or magazine today, browse around social media, you will hear about educational technologies. You will hear schools talk about all the time, school board debated all the time. Should we spend more millions on it, what is it . The thing you need to understand is during the plato era it is the first modern Educational Technology, the idea was that the definition, the thinking was that Educational Technology means technology that educates and that i think is very different that a lot of what passes for Educational Technology today, which is more how we spend millions to teach students how to tweet or use facebook in an educational setting or use Google Searches and email and all the capabilities of google or whatever company is Offering Service to a school district. In other words its basically information technology, its it for schools and there isnt anywhere near as much teaching through the system, but back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, it was the mission of plato and competitors of plato, the idea is we are going to teach this system and the teacher doesnt have to do the teaching. And it was a pretty revolutionary and controversial idea. So lets move on to theuntold story. Its a very trite expression, theres 1000 times have that as their subtitle and i was tempted not to included and just call the book the friendly orange glowbut then i figured it would end up in a novels section in the bookstore which might not have been a bad idea , but in this case, i think its about as accurate and he will really accurate as you can imagine. Because there are no books, no magazines or articles, no movies, no documentaries, no 60 minutes segments, no programs that you have ever seen on plato anywhere. Theres never been a big wired cover story or even a middle cover story, according to Silicon Valley, plato doesnt exist and thats all as it should be. So this has created a challenge for an author whose writing a book about plato because usually when you try to do a history of something, you go to the sources and as the first step, read what everybody else is written, no ones ever written anything on plato so i had to interview everybody and it took about 30 years and then i did 7 Million Words of Interview Transcripts that i typed myself, that took a few years but it was the only way to get source material, to go talk to the people and luckily they are still around. Thats an interesting issue is we dont want to talk about tonight but theres a difference between history and journalism when you are trying to dig up a story. And some people have described me as a historian but im certainly not that. I dont have that training. Ive read a lot of history but i think with platos story being so fresh and recent and the majority of the people still around, still answerable on email and phones, this was the task for in keeping with the journalism profession or practices at least. So i approached this with a little bit of both. I had to talk to everybody, trying to figure out what the story was. That took a few years to. One thing to think about, the plato system was developed at the university of illinois in a small town surrounded by many miles of corn. Literally. Its an island of green. Go there in thesummer and you will see what im talking about. Five minutes in any direction and you are surrounded by cornfields. What i have always been blown away by with plato is the fact that even at the university of illinois, its arguable that theres another computer is more famous then plato and thats the howell 9000 from the movie 2001 and thats fictional. It was quote unquote invented in urban illinois in the 1990s if youve read the book and there are events where they celebrate the birth of how in urbana. And i went. To one of them. And im going around going but what about plato . Their life who . The greek guy . Hes down the hall. So this is the kind of thing weve been up against in trying to document the history of plato. Let me read a couple things from the preface. Im going to keep things moving but try to address this untold story thing because it really is a huge factor in this book. Its kind of like this book was an effort to solve a mystery and the mystery was what the heck is plato and why did the people who experienced it have this still this wideeyed vision. Like we saw the future before any of you guys kind of thing and the future being what everyone is doing now all day long. We were staring at the screen 40 years ago. Imagine discovering a small group of people had invented a fully functioning jet airplane a couple of flying Long Distances at hundreds of Miles Per Hour decades before the Wright Brothers launched their fragile craft into the wins over North Carolina in 1903. Imagine how such a discovery and disrupt our understanding of history. The story of plato is so far ahead of its time and perhaps the least known major 20thcentury Technology Project may strike you as just as impossible a story as the 19th century jet but plato really happened. Its a story of inventors, mavericks, hackers, visionaries, scientists and educators who came together at the heart of the american midwest. A story that so disrupts the conventional view of 20thcentury history that may make you wonder as it has made this author wonder how could this have happened . Where are the books, magazine articles, the documentaries, the Museum Displays should have covered the story. Has this tory gone untold, why are we only finding out now. We celebrate the rise of the internet, the world wide web, we celebrate the accomplishments of xerox, the Palo Alto Research center which in turn inspired apple and Macintosh Computers and much of the personal computing environment we use today. We celebrate the innovations by legions of Startup Companies and placed into the hands of millions, now billions of people. Innovations that have changed the world. Innovations people cannot imagine living without. We are living the shocking future that Alvin Toffler wrote about, warned us about 45 years ago and the history of how we reach this future has been researched, deciphered, organized and disseminated far and wide or long enough that the story has become legend set in stone, geeks and hackers are no longer outcast and ridiculed. They are sought after thought leaders. Many counted among the tens of thousands of millionaires and hundreds of billionaires. The list of heroes, names in the computer revolution is long but there is an equally long list of unknowncomputer pioneers. The people whose stories all the pages of this book. The level to which plato, its people and its history have been ignored is extraordinary given the only house a little the innovations work and how early is Online Community flourished how it happened. Plato was a Computer System but more importantly a culture, physical and online, a community that formed on its own with its own jargon, customs and idioms. A world familiar to us, yet subtly foreign. An entire era that clashes with accepted canonical hero history of social media, online communities, online games and online education. Its as if an advanced civilization and once thrived on earth and built a wondrous technology and then disappeared as quietly as they had arrived leaving behind graphs of legend and artifact only a few notice. This book was the result of an effort to capture the history of this lost culture of innovation before it vanishes completely by someone who had the Great Fortune to become of age and become digital as i