  The Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) seeks to measure
contemporaneous and early afterglow optical emission from gamma-ray bursts
(GRBs). The ROTSE-I telescope array has been fully automated and responding to
burst alerts from the GRB Coordinates Network since March 1998, taking prompt
optical data for 30 bursts in its first year. We will briefly review
observations of GRB990123 which revealed the first detection of an optical
burst occurring during the gamma-ray emission, reaching 9th magnitude at its
peak. In addition, we present here preliminary optical results for seven other
gamma-ray bursts. No other optical counterparts were seen in this analysis, and
the best limiting sensitivities are m(V) > 13.0 at 14.7 seconds after the
gamma-ray rise, and m(V) > 16.4 at 62 minutes. These are the most stringent
limits obtained for GRB optical counterpart brightness in the first hour after
the burst. This analysis suggests that there is not a strong correlation
between optical flux and gamma-ray emission.
