User:Sjgooch

Sherwin Jay Gooch was born at 01:23 a.m. on April 9, 1952, in Mercy Hospital, Champaign, Illinois, USA. He is the eldest son of Jay Doyle Gooch, a life-long amateur radio enthusiast & electrical engineering researcher, and Bede Estelle Gooch (Piercy), an educator and homemaker.

In the sixth grade in 1963, when Mr. Gooch was 11 years old, his Yankee Ridge class was asked to participate as guinea pigs in an experiment being conducted by Dr. J. R. Suchman called "Inquiry Training". Some researchers in the education department of The University of Illinois had heard that computers were to be the wave of the future, and that they communicated using "ones and zeros" which represented true-and-false or yes-and-no. Getting things entirely backward, the educational researchers decided to prepare students for the future by instructing them in a method of learning in which the students were allowed to gather information only by collecting the answers to questions constructed such that a hypothetical teaching-computer-of-the-future could answer them by replying with only a "yes" or a "no" ('1' or '0'). It was a highly revered, documented, intellectualized, and footnoted post-graduate version of "20 questions."

The investigation culminated with a session on 2-station PLATO II, hosted, at the time, by the Illiac I computer. The computer showed Mr. Gooch and a classmate, John Goodell, individually, a short film of a bimetallic strip being alternately heated and cooled. The students were then presented with a set of multiple choice questions which were to be answered by pressing one-of-four large, clunky (relay reset by the computer after each input), numeric teletype buttons.

In the middle of this interaction, a photographer stuck a camera over the wall of the cubicles housing the two small computer-driven black-and-white Conrac[tm] TV screens, and took a picture.

Mr. Gooch finished early. Wanting to play more with the computer, he asked permission to proceed through the instructional section of the program again. When he looped precisely to the point where the multiple-choice questions were to be presented for a second time...NOTHING!!! The computer would not respond anymore. Someone walking into the room said something excitedly about how if two things "happened within the same microsecond, then maybe..."

It was the first time that Mr. Gooch crashed a digital computer. It was not to be the last.

The picture of the top of Mr. Gooch's crew-cut head was subsequently published in an article describing how two inventive physicists from the University of Illinois, Don Bitzer and Chalmers Sherwin (coincidentally Mr. Gooch's namesake), had come up with an idea to build a "teaching machine" called "PLATO."