Computer-assisted instruction system

The computer-assisted instruction system emerged because a 25-year-old lab assistant at the University of Illinois thought he could build what a committee couldn't agree on—and ended up inventing half the features of modern computing in the process.

In 1959, physicist Chalmers W. Sherwin suggested the university build a computerized learning system. Weeks of committee meetings produced no consensus. Daniel Alpert mentioned the stalemate to his laboratory assistant, Donald Bitzer, who had been thinking about the problem. Bitzer offered to build a demonstration system. Project PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was established, and in 1960, PLATO I ran on the university's ILLIAC I computer—a television set for display and a special keyboard for navigation.

What began as an educational experiment became a laboratory for networked computing. By the late 1970s, PLATO supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen networked mainframe computers. The system pioneered features that would later seem obvious: forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer video games. PLATO users were experimenting with social computing decades before the web existed.

The plasma display was born from PLATO's constraints. To get courses into schools, Bitzer needed to distribute graphics to remote terminals cost-effectively. He and colleague Gene Slottow, with graduate student Robert Wilson, co-invented the flat-panel plasma display in 1964. The orange plasma displays incorporated memory and bitmapped graphics, allowing a single telephone line to run 16 terminals. Bitzer, Slottow, and Wilson received an Emmy in 2002 for this technology—the ancestor of every flat-screen television.

In 1967, the National Science Foundation began steady funding, allowing Alpert to establish the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL). For two decades, Bitzer managed PLATO's growth while pioneering digital technologies that extended far beyond education.

Donald Bitzer died in December 2024 at age 90. His legacy includes not just PLATO and plasma displays but the demonstration that a single project, pursued persistently, could generate cascading innovations. The committee couldn't agree on how to build computerized education. The lab assistant built the future.