by Brian Dear
Using CERL stationery and the university’s media facilities, Umpleby and Lamont sent out a press release inviting local dignitaries, including the mayor, the city council, state senators, and the local media, to come and try out the program. It wasn’t the normal sort of press release the CERL lab would issue, and it’s not clear if Umpleby and Lamont first checked with the powers-that-be at CERL for permission. Nevertheless, the press release went out. Not everyone they’d invited showed up, but some did, and the feedback was mixed:
“This is Big Brother!”
“This puts too much control into the hands of the people!”
“This program can’t possibly do justice to all the alternatives surrounding this issue.”
The turnout was thin. CERL staffers were not amused. Some went so far as to view Creek as a potential PR nightmare for the laboratory. They were aghast that Umpleby and Lamont had the nerve to use such a weak application to demonstrate PLATO—especially to important local government officials. People would get the wrong impression and Creek wasn’t even educational. PLATO could do so much more, and didn’t those two realize that CERL hadn’t received funding from NSF yet and this might put PLATO IV at risk?
It didn’t take much to rouse the curmudgeonly systems programmer Rick Blomme, but Creek especially annoyed him. “The Creek lesson was the biggest joke of all time,” he said. As far as Blomme was concerned, Creek had no place on PLATO and made PLATO look bad. It should have been a documentary film or slide show shown at City Hall.
“I agree with him,” Umpleby would admit of Blomme’s harsh critique, many years later. “It could have been done with just an ordinary 35mm slide show. But all I can say is that it was an experiment.”
Creek did wind up being used for one unintended educational purpose: Judy Sherwood of the PSO consulting group, CERL’s online support team for PLATO authors and instructors, would cite it as one of PLATO’s lesser moments. “Umpleby was an unmitigated ass,” Sherwood would post online in 1977, in a series of heated messages remembering the Boneyard lesson. She regretted that Creek wasn’t available on the PLATO IV system, as it would have continued to serve as an example of What Not To Do. Bruce Sherwood was also annoyed with Umpleby’s “chasing after big-name people,” concerned that it “would have done us all serious damage if any of those invitees had taken him seriously, because Creek was really infantile. It’s not a question of someone being a good programmer or not, it is a question of caring about quality and being able to discriminate between good and bad work.”
George Carter, who’d been a UI student in 1973, defended the efforts of Umpleby and Lamont. “The invitations to ‘big names’ was simply youthful exuberance and should be interpreted as such,” he wrote in rebuttal. “I am sure anyone of any importance recognizes this. It could not have harmed the PLATO effort.” It was not the last time Umpleby would find himself embroiled in controversy and concern about harming the PLATO effort.
In 2006, Lamont and Umpleby (and PLATO) having long gone from Illinois, someone launched a Boneyard website, containing everything you ever wanted to know about the creek. As of 2017 there are now multiple Boneyard websites, run by a number of community organizations and local governments. On these sites, one can see photographs and maps of the creek, read about Boneyard’s background and history, its ecological importance as an Illinois watershed, the ongoing work being done to beautify and improve it, and find out ways to support and take further action, including participating in annual Boneyard Creek Community Days: precisely the kinds of uses of computer networks that Umpleby and Lamont had in mind, nearly fifty years ago, before anyone else, even the PLATO people, grasped what was going on.
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Despite ruffling many feathers at CERL, Umpleby and Lamont managed, by 1972, to scrounge up a grant of $26,110 from the National Science Foundation to investigate “the use of PLATO,” yet another press release announced, “to create a new mass communications medium for the discussion of long range community planning….PLATO terminals will present information on a local issue. Participants in the electronic town meeting will have some control over the flow of information. They will be able to skip sections or have some part of the lesson repeated.
“The purpose of the research,” Umpleby explained in the press release, “will be to find the most effective ways of presenting issues on the new medium. We will also try to determine whether patterns of communication and methods of making community decisions change as a result of the availability of the new communications medium.”
Umpleby and Lamont giving PLATO demo, circa 1972 Credit 28
By March 1973 Umpleby was penning articles in local papers, advocating for the “community use” of PLATO, fearing that soon the system was going to be swallowed up by corporations. “Try to think how you would like this system to be used,” he wrote. “In a few years PLATO is going to be big. But so far the majority of programs in the computer are just normal course material—there doesn’t seem to be any movement toward general citizen use. As this new federally funded resource comes into existence citizens should challenge any trend toward exclusive use. It should be a public resource. We must compete for a say in its use and set an early precedent of using it to serve our interests as members of the community.”
He soon figured out a new way to set an early precedent.
By the summer of 1973, Umpleby had taken to testing out FORUM, a new, experimental conferencing system created at the Palo Alto–based Institute for the Future. FORUM, a project funded by ARPA and NSF, ran on the new ARPANET network, the precursor to today’s Internet, and was designed to work on a variety of computers: from teletype machines connected directly to the network to dial-up terminals connected from virtually anywhere. Earlier in the year he’d started experimenting with a simple conferencing program on PLATO called Discuss, written by George Carter. Discuss enabled people to post up to ten lines of text as a message, to which others could then read and, if they chose to, respond with their own one- to ten-line messages. If you needed more than ten lines to make your statement, you had to post the first ten lines in a message, then reply to your own message with another, and so on. While other groups of PLATO users were discovering and quickly becoming addicted to live-chat applications (covered in Chapter 14), Umpleby was more interested in message boards. Live chat was synchronous—you literally had to be there, participating with the other participants in real time. Message boards, forums, conferencing systems were asynchronous—you could post your thoughts at 2 a.m. and not expect, nor care, when others would eventually see them, let alone post replies. Even if it was hours or days later before replies appeared, that was fine. Forums and email work the same today.
ARPANET’s FORUM message board content could not be shared on PLATO. Likewise, Discuss content on PLATO could not be shared on FORUM. Thus, participants in the two systems did not see messages posted on the other system. By 1973 the ARPA network and PLATO network reached sites all over the country, but the networks remained isolated from each other, one of the great tragedies in PLATO’s history. “They were both coast to coast,” recalls Umpleby, “but they didn’t overlap very much. The only places they overlapped, as I recall, were Urbana and MIT.” “Overlapping,” in this context, simply meant that there were PLATO and ARPANET terminals located in the same geographic sites, sometimes in the same room—but again, the connections on these foreign networks were physically separate, ships passing in the night. The closest PLATO and ARPANET would come was inside CERL, oddly enough, which happened to have an ARPANET terminal and a PLATO terminal both sitting along the same wall, like two televisions permanently tuned to different channels.
Umpleby, savvy to PR and maximum coverage, offered to transfer, by hand if necessary, postings from PLATO’s Discuss over into FORUM, so ARPA users would see them there. Likewise, he’d retype FORUM postings into PLATO’s Discuss. “There was a labor-intensive connection,” he says. “It was just an offhand proposal, and it was assuming very low traffic. B
ack in those days there were many systems and they didn’t overlap much, it was not at all like the current [Internet].”
In the summer and fall of 1973, the Watergate scandal was the national preoccupation. New, ever-more-shocking revelations emerged each day. Take, for instance, October 20, 1973, a date that quickly became known in the media as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” At 10:58 p.m. that night, Umpleby opened up a new topic in Discuss:
A news bulletin tonight reported that Nixon had fired Special Prosecutor Cox. Attorney General Richardson resigned. Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus then became acting attorney general. Nixon gave Ruckelshaus an order which he refused, so Nixon then fired Ruckelshaus. That made the solicitor general the acting attorney general. These events seem certain to produce a serious move for impeachment in the House with the only reservation being the war in the Middle East.
What started out as a fairly factual opening statement suddenly veered in a different direction. Umpleby continued with a series of paragraphs offering a long set of citations linking the Watergate scandal to the JFK assassination. He finished with a question:
What do the participants in this discussion think about all of this: the firing of Cox, the chances of impeachment, and the possibility of connections between Watergate and political assassinations?
Umpleby’s post was no different, in format if not in content, from any typical online message board posting over the past forty years. Except in 1973, this kind of computer-mediated group conversation was exotic and new. Very few people in the world had any idea what it would mean to have a “discussion” with other people online on a computer. Yet note how even at the very dawn of computer conferencing, conspiracy theories were alive and kicking.
A variety of PLATO users, mostly students working at or around CERL, read Umpleby’s post and responded into the night and the next day. “The firing of Cox was a bad move,” said John David Eisenberg in the first response that night. “Any connection of Watergate and political assassinations is at best very tenuous and, quite frankly, a highly dangerous item of discussion.” George Carter responded: “Nixon also ordered the FBI to seal off Cox’s offices, presumably the storage location of the evidence Cox and his now defunct eighty-man staff had been collecting on Watergate. Note that this puts Nixon in possession of the evidence against him.”
Umpleby was back the next day, asking Eisenberg, “How do you mean dangerous? Surely not knowing what is going on is more dangerous than knowing.” And so it went the rest of the day and into the night, with more postings about Nixon and Watergate and impeachment.
Leonard Lurie’s book The Impeachment of Richard M. Nixon had just come out. Umpleby read it and decided to post a summary of Lurie’s arguments on Discuss. But he also decided to see how he could use PLATO and ARPANET not just to debate the issues, but to accelerate the impeachment process by consolidating the political power of geographically separate activist groups. With PLATO and ARPANET, he imagined reaching hundreds, perhaps in time thousands of people. Online was the inevitable future for activism.
“The Undergraduate Student Association on the Urbana campus is engaging in a major effort to lobby Congress in favor of impeachment,” Umpleby posted in Discuss on Monday, October 22. “They have been circulating petitions in the student union, dorms, etc. They have set up tables where students can write letters to their congressmen. Tuesday night there will be a meeting in Lincoln Hall to organize further actions—to take the campaign off campus and into shopping areas. What are other campuses doing on impeachment? Would people on other campuses please tell your student government and student press that these programs exist and can be used to coordinate actions if necessary or to pass around bright ideas.”
On October 24 on ARPANET, Umpleby posted an update to the FORUM participants:
Saturday night after the big announcements, we started up a conference on PLATO about impeachment. One lesson space filled up and we are now using a second. People from MIT, Chicago, Ames Iowa, and Ft. Wayne Indiana signed in and we tried to use the program to coordinate campus actions. However, there is the problem that the people with ready access to terminals are not always the student activists. We have been working on conferencing among campuses for almost two and a half months now [and] are disappointed that it is not going better.
He posted again on ARPANET later that day. “Our conferencing activities are proceeding steadily and advancing slowly,” he said. “We are trying to interest national activist groups to use the PLATO net for communication among local chapters that have terminals available. We are now working on Common Cause, The Federation of American Scientists, peace researchers, and cyberneticists and general systems researchers. Any other suggestions of likely groups?”
It didn’t take long before someone in ARPA’s office at the Pentagon came across the FORUM postings on ARPANET—after all, they were funding not only ARPANET itself, but also this experimental FORUM project. It wasn’t long after that that someone up the chain of command in the Pentagon read them. And it didn’t take long for the brass in the Pentagon to hear about it. Nor did it take long for word to cross the Potomac and reach the people in Nixon’s besieged White House. It was right around this time that the White House was making efforts, on Nixon’s orders, to cancel FCC applications by Washington Post–owned television stations in retaliation for their reporting of Watergate. This was not a good time for Nixon’s people to learn of talk of impeachment and political mobilization going on over the wires of some damn Defense Department–funded computer network out in the cornfields of Illinois. Keep in mind that this was an era when “political mobilization” and activism on college campuses was taken very seriously: buildings were often taken over, demonstrations often turned violent, campuses were sometimes completely shut down, and sometimes people were killed, as at Kent State University and Jackson State College just a few years earlier. It is certainly possible to imagine that some of these concerns might have entered the minds of the government officials. If the Nixon administration had no misgivings about abusing its governmental power to go after activists, political mobilization, and even The Washington Post for its coverage of Watergate, it does not require a stretch of imagination to see how they’d have no problem shutting down obscure, government-funded computer networks over which anti-Nixon opinions were being expressed. The White House’s reaction to this is significant in that this may be the first time in history, and it would certainly not be the last, that a government threatened to shut down people communicating over a computer network because it did not like what they were saying.
Don Bitzer, as usual, was on the road, but it didn’t take long for the Feds to find him. It was now November 2. He was about to leave his Philadelphia hotel room and head over to address graduates at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, but just as he reached for the door, the phone rang. What follows is how he remembers what happened next.
NSF (National Science Foundation): We just got a call from Nixon’s office. The White House essentially said to us that our money would disappear if this goes ahead, and we know you’ll disappear and uh…we’re concerned. What are you going to do about it?
BITZER: Well, I’m going to have a live terminal with me online when I go and give my talk, and I’ll look it up and see what’s going on. What I’ll do is as follows: If this conversation that they’re planning is the kind of thing that would be a productive conversation in a classroom, remember you have funded this for education, that would be acceptable as classroom discussion in political science, it will go on. If it is a political rally, which is not what we’re supposed to be doing, then I will tell them that they either have to change the topics, change what they’re doing, or stop it. And that will be my decision.
NSF: Fine. [click]
Bitzer hung up, but the phone immediately rang again. Now it was ARPA at the Pentagon.
ARPA: We just got a phone call from the White House. Says that you’re one of the sponsors
of this. Boy, you’re in trouble and we’re in trouble if this goes through.
BITZER: Yes, the NSF and ARPA had poured millions of dollars into PLATO, and, yes, the NSF and ARPA were divisions of the executive branch of the government. Yes, it might seem like there was a PLATO effort to bring down the head of the executive branch of government whose NSF and ARPA divisions were funding PLATO. I haven’t seen the actual postings yet, and will check them out and make a decision after reading them.
ARPA: We think what you’re doing is right, and we think Nixon’s wrong. You go ahead and do it. Unless you think it’s wrong, you go ahead and do it.
BITZER: Well, I’m going to look at it. [click]
Bitzer went over to the Moore School, logged into PLATO, and went into Discuss to see what all the fuss was about. He then made a long-distance phone call to Illinois. That same day, as a result of that phone call, word got to Umpleby, who posted a new note in Discuss:
About noon today Bruce Sherwood told me that he had had a phone call from Don Bitzer, Director of CERL. Apparently the Pentagon tracked down Don at a conference he was attending in Philadelphia and asked him about a comment made by me in program FORUM on the ARPA network. The Pentagon, it seems, was concerned that a facility of the executive branch (the ARPA net) was being used to organize an impeachment effort. Don’s position is that any discussion that might take place in a classroom will be permitted on PLATO. However, use of the system for political organizing will not be allowed as long as the system is a university facility. When such systems become common carriers, like the telephone lines, then they could be used for any purpose. This sounded like a reasonable view, so I told Bruce we would cooperate.
