by Brian Dear
Many came to learn. Many came to program. Often that led to programming projects and possible income. What they worked on, on the side, having secured authoring access to PLATO, was sometimes another matter altogether.
13
The Big Board
A new wave of PLATO kids continued to pour into CERL month after month. Somehow, if you were the least bit curious about cool new computers and graphics and technical things, you would find PLATO or PLATO would find you, and call to you until you made the pilgrimage.
Doug Green was a senior at Urbana High School in 1972. “Urbana had three tracks,” he says of his school. “The college-bound track, the maybe-college-bound track, and the blue-collar track. And they put me in the middle one. So I got some college-bound courses, ‘just in case maybe this stupid kid will grow up to have a brain.’ ” It was November 1972 when Green first heard the siren call from this exotic new PLATO computer. “I was seventeen but looked older,” he says, “and was sneaking into off-campus parties.” At one Saturday night party he heard someone say, “Hey, let’s go play with PLATO.”
“What, modeling clay? You’re kidding.”
“No, man, it’s a computer over on campus.”
PLATO until then had been completely unknown to Green, but, he says, “from the description I knew the building it had to be in. I parked on Goodwin and there was a sign I’d not noted before, ‘Computer-based Education Research Lab.’ Huh. Had to be the place.” Green’s memory of the experience continues:
Inside the east doors, an arrow pointed to PLATO upstairs. I followed my nose up and around and down a long dimly lit corridor toward the sound of something I’d never experienced. I stood in the doorway…getting my bearings. The room lights were off. Cigarette smoke thick in the air, the ceiling disappeared in the gloom. Odd metal boxlike structures lined the room, jammed into rows on hefty library tables running all around the perimeter of the room, then jutting out into the center in an L shape, so from the door it was like walking into a spiral maze. Dozens of people in the room, sitting in groups of twos and threes, hunched over each of the boxes, their faces weirdly lit with a strange orange glow coming from some sort of non-TV screen on the front of each box. Surreal as hell, never seen the like. Doing things with some sort of typewriter keyboard, pointing at the screens, laughing and yelling instructions at each other. Suddenly somebody nearby yelled, “Got ’im!” and simultaneously across the room somebody else yelled, “Damn it!” Games! They’re playing games! I realized.
He continued to listen and watch. There was a new game out, just that week, called Moonwar. It was, he would learn, a “Big Board” game and all the rage at the time. When you entered a Big Board game, you first saw a list of players already paired off in the game as well as potential opponents, people not yet in the game with someone. Your task was to pick one of those potential opponents by “challenging” them, and if they accepted, off into the game both of you went to play against each other. The goal of Moonwar was to fire a laser and hope it hit your opponent who was moving, you didn’t know where to, so you had to not only guess the correct angle to fire at, but also guess where your opponent was going to be a moment from now.
Hours passed, days passed, and Green continued to come to CERL and watch, discovering other Big Board games like Spacewar and eventually Mazewar. “I was at a terminal playing Moon Lander when suddenly everything froze, all the screens went blank, and an enormous collective groan and sigh filled the room,” Green said. “PLATO had ‘crashed,’ that would probably be all for tonight. Most people trickled out, but some diehards stayed and talked. I had questions, lots of questions. Finally made it home about the time the sun was rising.” Yet another person had fallen under the spell of the Orange Glow. “I was hooked, instantly and thoroughly,” says Green. “I knew this was for me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I wanted it. I couldn’t yet dream how far it would take me.”
Green spent “every free minute” at CERL during the winter of 1972–1973. “This was before there was any kind of security system in place. Anyone could walk in off the street and press NEXT to begin, and simply enter the name of the game you wanted to play. And more. There were chemistry lessons, and math, and Esperanto lessons, and typing, and tons of computer science, and well, just what is there on this thing?”
His first “quest” was to find every single lesson there was on PLATO. “I had no idea of the depth” of this “daunting task,” he says. “I had a notebook in which I kept track of what I learned.” But beyond his discovering the riches of PLATO, he was discovering he was not the only person caught up in it. “I made friends, others like me who had no official standing and no real reason for being on PLATO except that it was fascinating, and we enjoyed the games enormously. An underground community was forming. And Rick Blomme took note of us.”
By 1972 Rick Blomme had spent years cultivating the talented kids he found drawn to PLATO, through encouragement and programming challenges to test their abilities. If a new arrival showed promise, he’d find something for them to do. If they did what he wanted, and the code was clean and bug-free, he might give them some file space to tinker on their own. “I knew Rick at first as the tall skinny fellow from upstairs,” says Green, “who wore the Fu Manchu mustache and the long stringy hair, who stood in the corner…and watched the game players with a sort of paternalistic air. A ‘systems programmer,’ I heard he was called, not knowing what it meant.”
In the early days of PLATO IV, the system crashed quite often, and system security was still weak. In fact, the notion of unique user identity had not yet been implemented, making it relatively easy for anyone to enter “user mode” and run programs, be they educational or recreational. And it was possible to enter “editor mode,” says Green, to view PLATO’s TUTOR code just like millions would be able to do decades later with HTML on the Web. With that knowledge, you could figure out how to write your own stuff, assuming you knew how to scrounge up the file space.
—
Blomme had been around PLATO now for more than ten years. On PLATO III he’d written his first game, which he called Spacewar, which he’d brought over to PLATO IV soon after PLATO IV was up and running. As befits the oftentimes parallel universes of computer history, the PLATO game was not the same as “Spacewar!,” created at MIT in 1962. What lands MIT’s Spacewar! in the history books is that it was a “video” game and very likely the world’s first: it exploited all of the speed and computing power of a brand-new, expensive DEC PDP-1, and used every single feature of the PDP-1 to faithfully simulate Newtonian physics—including gravity, orbital dynamics, and star fields—all in real time, with high-speed animation. Put another way, the hardware dedicated to Spacewar! offered Alan Kay’s “guaranteed cycles,” all of the system’s power, for a single user. PLATO III, on the other hand, was a time-sharing system running on top of the CDC 1604. Any game written for PLATO meant that it had to abide by all the rules and limitations of a program written on top of a time-sharing system. It didn’t have the luxury of being the only program running on the computer, the way the MIT game had. One severe constraint was graphics. MIT’s Spacewar! ran on the PDP-1’s expensive console display. PLATO had only its slow and antiquated storage tubes and TV displays.
Blomme viewed his Spacewar as a “chase game,” where two players, one marked as X and the other as O, chased each other around the screen. The goal was to jump on top of the other player. “I added some stuff in that made it really, really interesting because you had a limited supply of fuel, and you could change your update.”
Blomme’s design reflects not only an acceptance of the limitations put upon it, but an embrace of those limitations, as if to say, “Okay, so what can we do creatively within these constraints?” This design thinking would become a hallmark of PLATO games: compensating for the limits of the hardware and phone lines (which meant things displayed slowly on-screen) by turning them into features of the game. Thanks to PLATO’s Fast Round Trip, a player coul
d always count on fast keyboard responsiveness. Expert players learned to ignore what might be going on on-screen while pounding out a flurry of keypresses hoping that once the digital dust settled, the opponent had been vanquished. Says Brian Shankman, an early player of the game who confessed he often lost at it, “The screen was blank much of the time unless you waited for refresh, at which point you were probably a dead ship.”
Oddly, there was one feature of Spacewar that wasn’t even a part of the game proper, yet in some ways had the most lasting impact on the emerging PLATO gaming community: Spacewar’s Big Board. Given that Spacewar required two people to play at different terminals, it made sense to give users a way of seeing a list of people who were waiting to play a game, as well as who was already playing whom. The Big Board feature in hindsight seems inevitable: basic, simple, a no-brainer. But at the time it was revolutionary: it was the perfect solution to eager gamers wanting to find opponents to play these hyperactive, two-person games. Spacewar would not be the only game that would utilize the Big Board. Indeed, it would not take long for other games to pop up, using the same idea.
Those future Big Board game authors started out as Spacewar gamers. One of them was Louis Bloomfield. Born in Boston, his family first had moved to Cleveland, and then, in 1970, his father was invited to become the founding dean of the new medical school at the University of Illinois. Louis started ninth grade at Urbana Junior High. His father was interested in computer-based education, and wanted the medical school to utilize PLATO. It didn’t take long for Louis to be exposed to CERL, getting a tour of the second floor and seeing the room of now aging PLATO III terminals. These were PLATO III’s last days and the beginning of PLATO IV with its futuristic new terminals sporting the Orange Glow. In fact, Bloomfield would witness some of the new Control Data supercomputer hardware being carted onto the freight elevator at the back of the building, including the new CYBER, which was so heavy that it exceeded the elevator’s weight limits. (Not a problem: this was a building full of engineers, after all. Elevator posing a problem? Figure out a fix. Problem solved.)
Bloomfield got to know Blomme. He and two high school friends spent more and more time at CERL, not only playing Spacewar, but soaking up the ins and outs of TUTOR and all of the technology in the building.
Blomme in these early days of PLATO IV strove to be the top player in every game on the system, starting with, of course, his own Spacewar. Bloomfield also was good at Spacewar. Perhaps too good. “You’re moving around your little spaceship and you try to get the right or left of the player, and press the shoot button. And if you did that, you won, you got like three hyperspace jumps.” Hyper-jumps were essential to survival. “If you were getting desperate,” he says, “if the other player was going after you, you could just randomly jump on the screen.” One day Bloomfield hacked Spacewar and gave his little spaceship the ability to do a million hyperspace jumps. He became invincible. Blomme, no dummy, caught on right away. “He knew immediately I cheated, and he shut the game down for a while because he just got pissed.”
—
Bloomfield was soon writing his own Big Board game, Moonwar, over in the new PLATO classroom in the medical school annex. (It helped that his father was the dean of the medical school and a PLATO supporter.)
In a day or two he had the basics of the program working. “The first version,” he says, “I just wanted it up and running, you know, just a toy, just a game, I didn’t want to invest huge amounts of energy and time. We were always writing new little programs, new planetary motion programs or whatever, you’d write them in an afternoon, the aim was to just entertain yourself, and your buddies, they weren’t big life projects.”
The advantage of being able to work quietly in an off-site PLATO classroom that most of the diehards hadn’t heard about yet was that you could use two terminals to test out the multiplayer aspects of the game, without people standing over your shoulder asking questions and spreading rumors about a new game in the works. “I got to the point where I was pretty sure it was working right, but I needed somebody to play with, I mean, I was by myself…so I went over to CERL, and I just wandered into the author room, I guess it was, one big room, they had people there, and I found a guy, nobody there I knew at the time….I ran into a guy named Gordon Peterson, was his name. I buttonholed Gordon to play Moonwar with me. The first game we ever played was me versus Gordon, and it worked, and maybe if it had bugs, I fixed them.”
In Moonwar, after challenging an opponent listed on the Big Board and having your challenge accepted, you and your opponent entered the game. On-screen you’d see some circles with the word “mountain” written inside them. Then, somewhere on the screen was an “O,” just like in Spacewar, and elsewhere there was an “X.” The mountains were handy obstacles that blocked the laser beams that you’d fire at your opponent. Initially the game didn’t know how to handle poorly aimed lasers that were fired into the “wall” or edge of the screen. Those were simply “absorbed” as if they’d hit a mountain. But that didn’t last long. Eventually the game seemed to be influenced a tiny bit by a pool table, in that the edges of the screen became “reflective”—the game described them as “mirror-smooth walls” from which your laser fire would bounce at an angle, just like in a game of pool. Whenever you fired your lasers, you first needed to type in a specific angle, like 135 degrees, to aim the laser. Precision made all the difference. As did speed. The other player was always trying to fire a laser back at you. Moonwar was like a multiplayer pinball machine, and the PLATO community flocked to it. Like a viral video on YouTube today, word of Moonwar broke out quickly and it became an instant PLATO hit.
“Within a day or so,” says Bloomfield, “people started playing Moonwar, and the Big Board started becoming busy.” Then something strange happened. Bloomfield came in one day and found that his source code to Moonwar had been edited. Not by him, but by the systems programmers.
What they had put in his Big Board code was, in Bloomfield’s words, the “most incredible list of curse words I’d ever seen, all -putd-’d to nothing.” (-Putd- was a TUTOR command for replacing a text string with another text string, or, in this case, nothing.) Moonwar had become such a big deal in such a short time that Bitzer had been told about it. And naturally Bitzer tried it out, and naturally he started using it in his demos. There was just one small problem. It was commonplace that the gamers would choose every foul four-letter word or phrase they could think of as their pseudonym on the Big Board. It did not require a lot of imagination to envision Bitzer, up on a stage in front of a crowd of dignitaries, arms waving, hands gesturing, demonstrating his masterpiece, the PLATO IV system, typing commands into the keyboard, wowing the crowd with his magician’s sixth sense, and then eventually entering Moonwar, glancing at the Big Board, and seeing a bunch of player pseudonyms like “Shit Kicker” and “Motherfucker” all the way down the damn screen.
“Bitzer was mortified,” says Bloomfield. “So the command went out, There Will Be No Curse Word Login Names On The Big Board On Moonwar. They -putd-’d every swear word—I didn’t even know almost half these—I was the most naive Goody Two-shoes, and so I never swore back in that era, and here was this list, a hundred words long.” In the long history of attempts to block out curse words on computers, it is generally accepted as a law that such efforts never work, and often backfire. Moonwar’s Big Board Bitzer Emergency Curse Word Fix was one more example of it backfiring. Sure, it filtered out anything that even so much offered a whiff of something objectionable, but in so doing, it filtered out all sorts of completely harmless things as well. “It made it a little challenging to pick a name,” says Bloomfield, “because it would knock out any curse word even if it was in the middle of a word. Like, if you want to be ‘Bass Fisherman,’ the word ‘ass’ would lead to nothing, so you would be ‘Fisherman.’ ”
—
Rick Blomme was a hero to the new wave kids. “We really liked Rick,” says Bloomfield. “Rick Blomme was one of the co
ol guys who would talk to you and joke around—all these people in what was called the ‘s’ group, these are the system programmer types, so they had all the power, and we had to go up, they were on the fourth floor. And once in a while we would get let into the machine room.”
As cool as the kids viewed Blomme, Paul Tenczar, on the other hand, “was much more circumscribed and a tougher cookie in general,” says Bloomfield. “He was more all business. I think he thought some of us were nuisances. Surely we were in a way, we really pushed that machine to the limit. Whatever new command would come out, we would be in there using it, exploiting it….We were always pushing the limits, trying to get as much compute power as we could.”
Sometimes they pushed too far. “We would crash the machine, in fact the entire PLATO system, systematically, by trying something that no one had ever anticipated. And I can remember one day in particular where I wrote a chunk of code, and I executed it, and next thing I know, it says, ‘Welcome to PLATO.’ Everybody—all the terminals—I was at CERL—all the terminals are saying ‘Welcome to PLATO’—that’s a funny coincidence. So, once PLATO sort of came back up, I went and ran the code again. Immediately: ‘Welcome to PLATO.’ I thought, Oh: it’s not a coincidence. So I went upstairs to the fourth floor, and there are all the people in the machine room, I can remember a kid named David Frankel in particular, who was one of the ‘p’ programmers, the junior system programmers, he was at Uni High, and he was there pointing a finger at me going, ‘You, you, you, you, you!’ and they had my program printed out, and it was me.”
Any young hacker-wannabe poking around PLATO long enough was bound to figure out how to break through the weak security. This had already been proven multiple times with the Springfield High School gang. But now, in the earliest years of PLATO IV, 1972–1974, there were throngs, virtual armies of these kids poking around, not just at CERL, but at remote sites on the new, bigger system. Bloomfield eventually stumbled on his own way to break the security. “I figured out how to give myself system privileges,” he says. “I basically could do anything. And I thought…you know, after exploring the world where I wasn’t supposed to go, because I could go into any program, any lesson, all the system lessons, I would go in there, and I would read them carefully….You know, eventually it gets boring. I did everything I could do, without causing trouble. And I wasn’t interested in causing trouble, I just wanted to see what was up, so I figured, well, okay, I’ll go negotiate with Tenczar to see whether he’ll give me ‘p’ privileges, Frankel and Woolley and Kim Mast, other people who were the next people down from the system programmers, the kiddie system programmers….‘Will you let me be one of those, in exchange for telling him how I broke security?’ ”
