by Brian Dear
One of the things Bitzer and Sherwood asked Umpleby to do was add a disclaimer to the opening screen users would see as they entered Discuss. That night a page was added:
PLATO in its present implementation within the University of Illinois is essentially an extension of the classroom. While discussion of current topics is as legitimate on PLATO as in the classroom, it is not permissible in the classroom or on PLATO to organize political mobilization. For this reason, CERL cannot at this time permit the use of the PLATO system for organizing political activities. This note prepared by Bruce Sherwood for Donald Bitzer.
That night, Umpleby was back in Discuss with more:
Following conversations with Bruce in the afternoon and Don this evening, I have deleted those comments which called for other political uses of the system, and I ask that other participants similarly restrain themselves. Comments on this definition of the permissible uses of the PLATO system might be of general interest at this time.
The next day, Saturday, November 3, Umpleby updated the Discuss participants with more news:
The situation is apparently more serious than I thought yesterday afternoon. The Institute for the Future’s program forum on the ARPA network is no longer available….Continuation of their work seems to be endangered….It is hard to believe that a few comments in one program could cause such a reaction. What is also interesting, however, is that apparently on the basis of only one comment, the Pentagon understood the importance of computer-based communications media. Months and even years of talking and attempting to persuade social scientists had produced at best indifference. Such differences in reaction testify far more eloquently than a scientific article why those who are the establishment are there and why social science has been so ineffective.
That same afternoon Don Bitzer, back home from Philadelphia, chimed in online with a posting of his own:
More discussion is needed in order to decide just what constitutes open discussion with academic freedom and still stays within the extension of the classroom guidelines I’ve described. Let me try to explain the circumstances which brought on the problem. First the guideline that U of I Plato [sic] is to be used as an open classroom is not new. In fact, that guideline was used, to explain to ARPA—(A generous and enthusiastic supporter of Plato)—that it could only program lesson material also usable in our community college program. Because educational problems in the all-volunteer army overlap significantly with educational problems in community colleges, ARPA has been able to enthusiastically support Plato; even in view of the Mansfield Amendment. Second, when ARPA contacted me on November 2, they were concerned, but brought no pressure. Clearly, not all groups were living under the doctrine that ARPA was given and they were helping support Plato. ARPA’s suspicion was not aroused by what they saw on Plato, but what was contained in a message attributed to Umpleby on the ARPA network. This message in part called for help in mobilizing the impeachment and the use of Plato to aid in such mobilization. I determined that the use of Plato for political mobilization was not appropriate since Plato is part of the U of I educational system, and take sole responsibility for the policy statement at the beginning of each Discuss lesson. I have frequently been informed of the political dangers programs such as Discuss might thrust upon the Plato program. Nevertheless, I have felt that the potential benefits of open discussion on any topic outweigh these dangers and have permitted the use of Plato for these activities even at this early and fragile development stage of Plato. Misuse of Plato will certainly surely set back efforts to make Plato a beneficial tool to aid open discussion. Let me hear from all of you on this subject.—the real dlb.
Participants were quick to thank Bitzer for stepping in and taking a stand. “Professor Bitzer deserves considerable praise for allowing programs like this to exist,” said one user. “The response to Pentagon ‘suggestions’ by other University of Illinois administrators would have almost certainly been to simply delete the program to avoid a hassle, especially one with a funding agency.”
Nevertheless, the controversy cost Umpleby his access to ARPANET. “We didn’t have an NSF grant, so they couldn’t fire me. All they did was change the passwords so I couldn’t get on again. I never lost access to PLATO. But a lot of people on the PLATO system became very angry at me, because they thought the Pentagon was going to shut down the PLATO system and we’d all be out of work.”
The trouble for Umpleby was not over yet.
“There were two flaps,” says Umpleby. “There was the flap when it happened, and then there was the publicity flap. Now, see, I never tried to get any publicity for this during the fall semester when it happened. But then there was a guy named Craig Decker who was at MIT, he was a friend of mine, he was passing through campus, and, you know, he was doing the same thing everybody does, he said, ‘Well, hi, what are you up to, what have you been working on,’ picked up a few publications, and I said, ‘What are you doing,’ and he was just about ready to leave and he says, ‘Has anything else happened of interest?’ And I said, ‘Well, we did have a little bit of a flap with the Pentagon a few months ago.’ And he says, ‘Oh, tell me about it.’ So, I told him about it, and he says, ‘That’s really very interesting, because you know I have a friend at Businessweek and I think he might be interested in this story, do you mind if he calls you?’ And I said no.
“Now, at the time, I was a believer in talking to the press. The idea of, it’s important for the people to know, and the Jeffersonian thing about the value of a free press, and so I said, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to him.’ So this guy from Businessweek calls.”
An article entitled “No Computer Talk on Impeachment” appeared in Businessweek on March 16, 1974:
The Pentagon is picking a fight with top universities by refusing to let its Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network be used for a study of impeachment. The network, located at civilian campuses but funded by the Pentagon, is being adapted to provide a nationwide “teleconferencing” system. By using a designated code number, scholars could tap in at any time to contribute data and ideas to an on-going conference on almost any subject.
Some subjects apparently are taboo. Political science professor Stuart Umpleby of the University of Illinois says that the contractor for the network, Institute for the Future, turned him down when he proposed a study of impeachment and now is barring him from any access. “They were just scared they’d lose the contract and knuckled under to anything the Pentagon said,” he charges.
A writer for Science magazine, Dan Greenberg, saw the article. In addition to his work for Science, he wrote his own newsletter, from which articles were occasionally reprinted elsewhere in such publications as Change or New Scientist. Greenberg called Umpleby and they spoke. Soon, an article was published in Science in Government Report. “I thought he really missed the point, and I was kind of irritated with it,” says Umpleby. “I wrote a letter saying that we weren’t using PLATO for political organizing, et cetera.”
The story would not die. Soon it appeared in Change. Bitzer found out about it when he received a copy of the article from the president of the University of Illinois, with a note on it saying, What are you guys doing over there?
Bitzer called Umpleby into his office. Umpleby remembers the exchange this way:
BITZER: Umpleby, this is even worse than the last article. What are you doing? I thought that we had an understanding on this.
UMPLEBY: [Glancing at the Change article] This is word for word exactly the same article, I said I’m not doing these things, this is Greenberg’s doing.
BITZER: Send off a correction letter.
Umpleby sent a correction. “By that time,” he says, “I was persona non grata in the PLATO laboratory. Basically they retracted my office space and I moved out. Because people thought that I was ginning up this publicity program to go over Don’s head and generate a groundswell of public opinion about something and that that was even more threatening to the laboratory. Well, that’s when I became
rather unhappy with the press. But at the time I was trying to do my dissertation and so I just retreated into my apartment, wrote my dissertation, and left.”
He became a professor at George Washington University, where he’s remained for the past forty-plus years.
12
The New Wave
The projects undertaken by Umpleby and Lamont were noteworthy because they veered from the “traditional” use for which PLATO had been designed. No matter how freewheeling CERL’s policies were, or how far the “anything goes” spirit of the community extended, in the end there were limits to what was supposed to be done on this precious computer resource, and those limits were generally confined to PLATO’s broad educational mission. But then Umpleby and Lamont arrived on the scene, challenging preconceived notions of what could be done with PLATO. One could spin their work as educational in nature, although Umpleby’s attempts to use PLATO and ARPANET as platforms for political advocacy stretched to the breaking point the bounds of appropriate use. But maybe PLATO was more than education? Maybe PLATO should be viewed as a general-purpose resource? Maybe it was or would become a common carrier? What else could be done with this thing? CERL was about to find out.
The staff at the lab might have thought the work of Umpleby and Lamont was, if not disruptive, at least offbeat and unusual, but what they did with PLATO was nothing compared to the tidal wave of disruption that was building quickly and would soon hit CERL’s shores. There was a new wave coming, and it was made up of young people, teens mostly, coupled with their endless fascination with this computer. Young people had played a key role in PLATO from the start: either as guinea pigs for professors trying out new CAI lessons or pedagogical experiments, or as cheap, nothing-is-impossible labor to help build the system software. It was one thing for a handful of kids like Andrew Hanson and Mike Walker to get involved with the system, but another thing altogether for dozens, scores, hundreds of kids to descend on PLATO as the system expanded in the early 1970s. Many were “hackers,” though in the Midwest in the 1960s and 1970s, that term, if used at all, was often viewed as a pejorative for bad golf players and lousy carpenters. The last thing it denoted in the Midwest was skill, passion, endless curiosity, and expertise related to computers.
One early example of this new wave were the PLATO kids of Springfield High School, ninety miles west of Urbana in Illinois’ state capital. It was probably not a coincidence that CERL had placed, in 1969, a PLATO III terminal in the heart of a prominent high school in the state capital. “The capitol was just a couple blocks away,” recalls one student. “We could see it out the window.” The staff at CERL liked giving demos to elected officials in Springfield, so the Springfield terminal was connected to the best, most reliable storage tube back at the lab, yielding the highest-quality displays. “They wanted the legislators to see the best, of course.”
At an approximate cost of $18,000 a year (the equivalent of about $110,000 a year in 2017 dollars) that single PLATO III terminal connected via a ninety-mile line between the Springfield PLATO site and CERL did not come cheap. The terminal used a long-distance phone line for the student input from the keyboard back to the lab (around $300 a month), and a leased video line for the display and graphics (around $1,200 a month) from the lab to the terminal. Not that any of that mattered to the high school kids. From their perspective it helped that CERL and the adult supervision that came with CERL were far away. They found that the system was fun to program, and the remote time-sharing aspect—here was a lone terminal connected to a big fancy lab at the University of Illinois—also captured the imagination.
Some of the first students to try out the terminal and see what it could do were David Kopf, Doug Brown, and Mark Rustad. Kopf and Brown were given a lesson file to tinker with, called “dakdwbwk” (named after their initials and the abbreviated word “work”—a naming convention that would become common within the PLATO community in coming years), so they could learn TUTOR and build a program. Bruce Sherwood shared an annotated printout of one of his TUTOR physics lessons with Brown. “I remember being at home…leafing through this lesson printout,” Brown recalls. “I can still see a little picture of a car that he drew in one place…drawing a car and showing the forces of motion and all that stuff….I was learning TUTOR by going through his lesson, his annotations. Figuring it out that way.” Brown wound up building a game called Shoot the Q, where you could modify various forces and then launch a small letter “Q” as if it were a cannon ball, seeing it fly across the screen in a ballistic trajectory then dragged down by gravity.
Soon, the Springfield kids discovered there were people at the other end of the line over at CERL and it was possible to communicate with them. It wasn’t easy, it was rather crude, but it was possible. You could type a message into your TUTOR lesson file and someone, often Rick Blomme, would read it and post a reply. Blomme shared Bitzer’s style of encouraging—indeed, challenging—kids who came under the spell of PLATO to do something useful on the system, find a way to contribute rather than simply goofing around on it. For a high school kid with hackerlike proclivities, this was like being invited into the secret priesthood of high technology.
One aspect of the CDC 1604 that ran PLATO III was that it emitted sounds. The CERL staff had rigged up a device with a speaker so that the 1604 would play various sequences of beeps and boops depending on what the central processor was doing at the moment. This was a handy way for the system staff to simply hear the occasional “song” of the 1604 to know what was going on inside it. Blomme even rigged the 1604 to play the opening lines of “Pictures at an Exhibition” (a song he was known to play on piano over in the music building) whenever the machine booted up. Then, as keypresses began coming in from students out in the field, the machine would emit a signature rrrruuuuuurrreeeeEEEEPPP sound. (Some sounds indicated imminent trouble: if the system went REEEEPeeeerruuurrrpp it meant bad things were about to happen. “We came by one time,” says Blomme, “and we heard this REEEEPeeeerruuurrrpp and Paul Tenczar in the other room turns around, yelling, GET OFF! THE SYSTEM’S GONNA CRASH!”)
The Springfield kids were soon hooked. And, like Skinner’s pigeons, they’d arrive early at school, congregate around the single terminal, and peck away at the keyboard, hoping for a reward—in this case, something, anything, appearing on the TV screen. Any response was a kind of reward. Sometimes there was no response, but they pecked away anyway knowing that eventually there’d be a response. There had to be. Wouldn’t there be?
They often got to school before Blomme got to CERL, or if not Blomme, whoever was at CERL that day had gotten around to booting up the 1604. Blomme recalls one incident where he was there in CERL very early, preparing to boot up the system, hearing the trusty “Pictures at an Exhibition” tune as the system came up. There wasn’t a soul around; CERL’s own classroom full of PLATO III terminals was empty. But then he heard a distinct rrrruuuuuurrreeeeEEEEPPP, indicating someone, somewhere was pressing a key on a PLATO keyboard. But it couldn’t be—nobody was around, he thought. Then it dawned on him: it was the kids out at Springfield, patiently pressing NEXT, waiting for something to happen.
Sometimes patiently pressing NEXT got boring, so the Springfield gang resorted to more clever tricks. There was a rotary phone next to the terminal, but a lock had been installed on the dial, as the school didn’t want to pay the steep long-distance fees for outbound calls. That did not stop the high schoolers. “We learned to dial the phone by bouncing on the hook to generate dialing pulses,” says Rustad. “We came up with the idea of placing a collect call to the PLATO operator’s office and ask for ‘Springfield PLATO’ and if he was out, when would he be back.” One time they placed a collect call but Rick Blomme, nobody’s fool, picked it up. “ ‘We have a collect call for Mister Put-Us-On,’ ” Blomme remembers the operator saying. “They got hell for that from me, I said, ‘Don’t do that again.’ ”
They discovered that the repeated bouncing of the phone’s ho
ok to simulate a rotary dial was not such a good idea. “That mode of dialing turned out to be really hard on the phone equipment,” says Rustad, “so we had to stop that. I guess that was when we learned to pick the lock on the phone dial. I guess there was a lot of learning going on.”
On most other time-sharing systems around the country, these kinds of high school shenanigans would not have been tolerated. Strict rules would have been put in place, limiting who could get access and what they were allowed to do if granted access. CERL was different. Thanks to Bitzer, Blomme, Tenczar, Sherwood, and other staffers, if you were a kid who showed a fascination with PLATO and a desire to learn how to program, then it was possible to find not only encouragement at CERL but mentorship as well. A big help was finding a sponsor. The two major sponsors were Tenczar and Blomme. Blomme would throw down challenges to the Springfield kids, daring them to debug some code, figure out what the code did and be prepared to explain it, or write some new code that did a particular task. A number of the Springfield kids would pursue this new opportunity and it would change their lives.
—
Mark Rustad had found the PLATO terminal at Springfield while a freshman in 1970, but it wasn’t until the following year that he began spending a lot of time hacking PLATO III. Some of his exploits would become the stuff of legend.
It was in 1971 that Rustad created an example of what would be recognized today on the Internet as “phishing”: he created a program that looked like PLATO’s login page, behaved like PLATO’s login page, but in fact was fake. Rustad had become fascinated with exploring the memory of the 1604 computer. He’d discovered that it was possible to poke around the entire system’s memory and look at any bits and bytes he wished: even the memory of programs being used by other users on the system at that moment. PLATO III was an open book, completely unsecure. CERL had not hardened down the system from such unauthorized pokes and peeks. “They didn’t perceive the risks of reading [memory],” Rustad says. “I taught them. One of my programs simulated the login page, and had a part that allowed me to put other terminals into my program….I had decoded memory enough to be able to tell what every terminal was doing. So I could select idle terminals and put them into my simulated login page. Then I would wait. Whenever someone logged in, my program would save the password and then return them to the real system so they wouldn’t even realize their password had been captured.” PLATO III’s welcome page sequence was primitive: “Welcome to PLATO,” it said, and underneath, “Press NEXT to begin.” Secretly, you could type “04891” (a reverse “1984” with a leading zero) to invoke what was called “Author Mode,” for authors to edit TUTOR lessons. But students wouldn’t know to do that, and simply pressed NEXT. Most students, that is.
