Don Bitzer

Donald Bitzer (1934-2024) was an American electrical engineer and computer scientist known as the father of PLATO and co-inventor of the flat plasma display panel, which he developed in 1964. He led development of the PLATO system, an early combination of computer graphics and touchscreen technology used for computer-based education, and held numerous patents across several technological domains. Bitzer earned a bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1955, 1956 and 1960, and from 1989 served as a Distinguished University Research Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1974, named an IEEE Fellow in 1982, won an Emmy Award in 2002, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2013. He died of congestive heart failure in Cary, North Carolina, on December 10, 2024.