It's not often that engineers win an Emmy, but in early October three University of Illinois electrical engineering alumni received the prestigious award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.  Donald L. Bitzer (BS '55, MS '56, PhD '60), the late H. Gene Slottow (PhD '64), and Robert H. Willson (PhD '66) were the inventors of the flat-panel plasma display, the forerunner of today's high-definition flat-panel television monitors.  They shared the 2002 Scientific and Technological Emmy for developing the groundbreaking display for the PLATO project, which itself was a radical achievement: the first computer-based educational program in the world.

PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was invented in the 1960s at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois where Bitzer and Slottow were on the staff.

In a 1999 article in Information Display, Bitzer wrote, "One of the important requirements of the PLATO system was a display that would support graphics with superimposed picture images."

The technology of the time did not allow this, so in 1963 he assigned graduate student Willson the task of exploring one possible solution to the problem.  About a year later, Bitzer and Slottow found themselves together waiting for their wives to pick them up after work, and they began discussing Willson's results.

"Both wives were late in arriving, so we began a discussion focused on reducing the early work to as simple a configuration as possible, utilizing the natural capacitance characteristics of a glass panel," Bitzer told Information Display.  "Our wives still think that they and their tardy arrival deserve part of the credit for the invention."

The discussion turned out to be a fruitful line of inquiry, and after several months of further refinement, the first plasma panel was operational. The PLATO Project had its delivery system and soon was being used to educate the first of many generations of students throughout the world.

Bitzer left the University of Illinois in 1989 to become a Distinguished University Research Professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.  Today Willson is an engineer with Analex Corporation of Alexandria, Virginia.

Recently, Bitzer said, "I'm really pleased that NovaNET (PLATO's current name) is still alive today after 40-something years and still delivering education to over one  hundred thousand students, bringing them back to school and keeping them in school. What appealed to me most (about the plasma screen display) was I saw it as a way of delivering education. That was the most important thing."