by Brian Dear
Deep down Don Bitzer was a hardware person, an electrical engineer through and through. All of these communications features added to PLATO, largely by undergraduates and sometimes high schoolers, were not part of Bitzer’s original vision. But even he could see the impact they were having on the system. Bob Yeager, who worked on the elementary reading project, had one of the more comfortable offices in CERL, which made it fair game for demos to visiting guests. But the main reason his office was chosen for frequent demos was that it was one of the main rooms for the elementary reading project, which, he says, “had all the gadgets. We had audio, we had slides, we did touch, and everything.” Often Yeager would be working away at his terminal when Don Bitzer would appear with some guests and have him move aside so Don could “drive” and do his magic. “The early demos were always the lessons,” Yeager says, “and he would show those various things….But someplace around ’74, ’75, the demos changed. He started doing demos of TERM-talk, of being able to see somebody else’s screen and work on it, Notes…and then he would do a little bit of stuff on the lessons, but I don’t think he did that on purpose, but I think gradually he himself began to see the communication aspects that we now call the Internet and so forth, that he had there in PLATO. The lesson side, computer-based education stuff, became less important. He was so dedicated to that, that’s been his life, but I think he saw this other opportunity of communication and I was able to watch that and it was just fascinating to see how, looking back, how subtly more and more time went to the communications and less and less time went to the lessons.”
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It is tempting to assert that the PLATO system was the birthplace of social networking and social media. The historical facts suggest otherwise; at best, the answer is a nuanced “not really, but early signs had begun to show.”
Consider the impact of another PLATO system feature, Access Lists, on the online community. Access Lists were customizable lists of users for whom access should or should not be granted or restricted to some file on the system. The notion of access control had been around forever—starting with passwords on files to protect who could view or edit a file. Every time-sharing computer system had to deal with security features like these; PLATO was no different. With the explosion of new notesfiles on PLATO in 1976, it was possible to designate one or more “directors” of a notesfile, as well as who had and who didn’t have read/write, read-only, or even write-only access to it (=psonotes= would be write-only to all users except the PSO staff, and served as a place to privately ask a question or report a concern to the PSO consultants). That led to a general-purpose Access List facility that could even be applied to a TUTOR lesson. A file’s owner could specify custom definitions of access, which might have special relevance for that file only. This new emphasis on access control added a new dimension to PLATO that had not been there before. Naturally, the user community figured out uses for it that its creators had not dreamed of.
The way some users utilized Access Lists in notesfiles provides a tiny hint at the phenomenon of social networking that was coming in several more decades. Dave Woolley takes a different view. He differentiates what he saw on PLATO versus what we see today in social networks this way: with PLATO notesfiles, he says, “the first order question was ‘what’—what do I want to talk about, what project are we working on. With Facebook (and Twitter and LinkedIn, etc.) the first-order question is ‘who’—who do I know, who do I want to be in relationship with. Of course, both PLATO and Facebook provide ways of addressing both organizing principles, but their basic natures, or affordances, are different. In a ‘what’-based system the access list is secondary; in a ‘who’-based system the access list is primary.”
In Woolley’s view, the geography of the PLATO system influenced how people organized themselves around “whats”—particularly when it came to notesfiles. If you had an interest in movies, you gravitated to the =filmnotes= notesfile, the place for people with an interest in that topic. If your interest was in religion, there were numerous religious notesfiles you could visit. If your interest was music, there was =musicnotes=. If your interest was sports, there were countless notesfiles on various sports. If your interest was interpersonal relationships, lesbian issues, gay issues, or other sexual-identity issues, again, numerous notesfiles, some with the “Anonymous Option,” were available. (The Anonymous Option enabled users to post notes and responses anonymously, the theory being that users might be more open to participating without the burden or embarrassment of revealing their identity.) Woolley argues that the center of the universe in PLATO was the “what”—be it a game, a lesson, a notesfile on a certain subject, or whatever. Present-day social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook are completely different, having architectures entirely focused on the “who”—you as user are the center of the universe for these services. You can “friend” or “follow” other people, and the system will keep track of them and aggregate their status updates on your “feed.” PLATO did not have social networking tools like friending, following, sharing, or likes. The World Wide Web would have to arise to give birth to hyperlinks and those sorts of tools first. Says Ray Ozzie, who in the 1970s was a UI undergraduate and also worked as a programmer at CERL, “In my experience with PLATO, social and relationships were strong overlays that we experienced hand in hand with the technology. The system and the activities brought us together, but we maintained the social network in our minds, hearts, souls. Not in a friends list.”
But as more and more PLATO users created private notesfiles over the years, particularly beginning around 1980 and beyond, there was a shift. Participants in these private notesfiles returned to them each day not because they were a “what,” but more because of the “who”—that is, they sought out news and updates from those happy few designated as having access (thanks to the Access List) to that private place. These users belonged to small private groups of people who chose to connect to each other. It defied all of the later computer-science definitions of a true social network, but the people involved at the time didn’t care: they were connected, privately, and that’s what mattered. Cliques of users had been around on PLATO IV since the beginning—recall the private channels possible in Talkomatic—but they abounded as PLATO expanded around the world in the 1980s. Oftentimes these private notesfiles were made up of a couple in a relationship, or friends, current or former classmates, and current or former co-workers, all using PLATO as a way to stay in touch, exchange stories, observations, complaints, gossip, as a way to connect. To belong to a private notesfile consisting only of friends was a way to use a computer system to communicate comfortably in a trusted forum that outsiders could not see, invade, or ruin. Much like Facebook today. Likewise, the Sequencer can be seen as a primitive news feed or timeline billions of people use every day on social networks. Not in the sense of how information was displayed, but in the sense of how information was compressed and filtered, enabling a PLATO user to scan through vast amounts of messages to, in effect, find out “what’s new” each day.
PLATO was emphatically not a social network as we would define one today. The term did not even exist then. But the way users began to organize themselves around each other—as opposed to how PLATO’s creators thought users wanted to be organized around “whats”—shows that the online community had begun to evolve. They had embarked on a path that can be confidently viewed as baby steps toward what is commonplace online today.
15
Empire
The first thing they noticed was the ears. They were just plain wrong. They seemed tiny—really, really tiny—when they were supposed to be big and pointy. That would be strike one against him: the absence of that universal trademark, his Vulcan ears. And he wasn’t wearing his regulation blue shirt, black pants, and black boots. No Federation logo in sight. No communicator, phaser, or tricorder either. And what was he doing with that scruffy beard? What was that about? It was like he’d gone AWOL. It was against regulations—and his hair! The whole
image was wrong. What were those things on his face—glasses? Glasses? Gone was that distinctive, trim, straight-as-a-ruler, Federation-issue haircut so familiar to millions. Instead, this mere human’s hair was longer, scruffier, one might say, normal?
Strike two against him was the distinct whiff of alcohol that followed him around during the visit, at least that’s how many who were there at the lab that day remember it—for some of them it was the first thing that came to mind when asked about the visit decades later. “He was drunk,” says Bill Golden. “There’s no question.” Even Bitzer remembered the alcohol smell.
Spock without his Vulcan ears. A few days’ start on a beard. Smelling like booze.
It was Tuesday, May 7, 1974. Actor Leonard Nimoy was in town, on a press junket, meeting with reporters, grabbing a bite in the back room of a local restaurant (where Nimoy, more interested in talking about his serious acting, grew aloof at reporters’ incessant Star Trek questions—didn’t they realize the Trek series had ended five years earlier?), stopping by the television stations for even more meet-and-greets and promotional interviews, shaking hands with local dignitaries, all these hi-how-are-ya’s an effort to fill the seats for his “raunchy” (according to one newspaper review) stage performance as the rebellious lead character R. P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Little Theatre on the Square, an hour’s drive to the south in the tiny Illinois town of Sullivan. The show had just opened a few days before and was going to run for a couple of weeks. Nimoy wanted the world to know he was a serious stage actor—and what a run he was on during this time: Oliver!, Camelot, Fiddler on the Roof, The King and I, and, now, Cuckoo—but the throngs who still watched Trek reruns religiously on TV were saying: Not so fast.
And now here he was in CERL. The voice was the same. It was him. But it wasn’t. Those tiny ears! Nimoy and his entourage made their way down the first-floor hallway, past classrooms full of terminals, and then he spent a lot of time admiring the fish in CERL staffer Susan Rankaitis’s office aquarium. The entourage, led by university vice president Barry Munitz (the same Munitz largely responsible for the university administration reorganization that led to Dan Alpert’s removal as dean of the Graduate College), eventually made its way up the stairs to the fifth-floor penthouse, home of Sherwin Gooch’s music lab.
They entered an office shared by Doug Brown and David Woolley, who watched as Nimoy wryly commented on an ASCII printout (of a naked woman) taped to the wall. Connie Brown, a UI undergrad at the time, remembers Nimoy being cranky—everyone wanted the green-blooded, pointy-eared, exceptionally logical Spock, not this mere man, this actor named Leonard-something, this down-and-out, can’t-get-a-movie-deal, struggling actor who would, only a year after this visit, publish his bridge-burning autobiography entitled, fittingly, I Am Not Spock. Nimoy wasn’t giving them what they wanted.
They sat him down in a chair in front of a PLATO terminal to bask in its Orange Glow and witness the future. They showed him games, including an early version of Empire, PLATO’s multiplayer space war shoot-’em-up game with its tiny little Federation starship. Sherwin Gooch showed him how PLATO played music through his Gooch Synthetic Woodwind. Revolutionary at the time, this was a music synthesizer connected to a PLATO terminal through which one could write and play music, even view musical notes in their full graphical glory on-screen, and touch the notes and hear them played over speakers or headphones. It was inconceivable, like so much of PLATO at the time. So far ahead of a future people weren’t ready to comprehend, they often simply didn’t comprehend it.
A local newspaper photographer snapped a picture of Nimoy watching the PLATO terminal’s screen. Along the office wall rose a stack of countless crates of empty soda bottles, which the denizens of the PLATO penthouse collected until someone got around to taking them all the way downstairs to the soda machine on the first floor. Usually no one got around to taking them downstairs, and so the pile grew until it stacked up to the ceiling. The stack itself was a thing to behold now, so why mess with it?
While Gooch and the others were demoing PLATO’s music capabilities to the star, Nimoy mentioned to the onlookers that he had recorded albums of his own. The penthouse gang politely stayed mum about Nimoy’s oddball, campy album Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space, wherein “his serious tone and refusal to break character makes this a first-rate experiment in comedy,” according to one review. “I remember I was too embarrassed,” says Gooch. “We had the record there in the office, and he was so bad.”
And then came strike three. Nimoy could not play chess.
That was the last straw. “We had heard he was a big, real-life chess fan,” says David Frankel, at the time the youngest member of the CERL systems staff. While Nimoy was seated down in front of the terminal one of the things they showed him was the PLATO chess program. No ordinary chess program, this. A marvel at the time, considering that the PLATO chess program featured a fully graphical display, replete with pictures of kings and queens, rooks, pawns, bishops, and knights, but in fact all that sizzle was nothing compared to the steak behind the scenes: PLATO’s chess was a mere front-end program, like a web browser or smartphone app of today, a client program, connected to a remote server running “Chess 4.2,” a then renowned chess program created by Larry Aikin and Dave Slate at Northwestern University that ran as a separate program on CERL’s mainframe, independent of PLATO, but connectable thanks to a programming interface they’d hacked together. This was not a toy, this was the real thing, and when it came to chess, this computer was good. And, if you were not careful, hard to beat.
But to the shock and dismay of the gathered onlookers, the ultra-logical Spock in real life knew nothing about chess. “I didn’t expect Nimoy to actually compete with the computer,” says Frankel, “but I figured he’d move a few pawns around and be amused that the computer could interpret his actions and respond. Plus our graphics were pretty sweet—most chess programs at the time were purely alphanumeric.” Nimoy’s Vulcan counterpart was celebrated as not only an expert at playing chess, but an expert at 3D chess. To discover that in real life the actor didn’t know chess at all was devastating to the gathered Trek fans. “People kept staring at his ears because they looked really, really small,” Sherwin Gooch recalls. “We had him there at the terminal, we logged him into chess, and he said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to play chess. Everybody thinks I know how to play chess but I don’t know how to play….But I know how most of the pieces move,’ and then we all of a sudden went like, uggghhhh.”
“We had a tough time getting any real action out of Lenny,” recalls Frankel. “He kind of nodded at the screen and our demo was very brief. He wasn’t very talkative and he looked like shit.”
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It is somehow fitting that Empire, perhaps the most famous PLATO game ever made, a game deeply influenced by Star Trek, should have originated in Iowa, birthplace of James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the Enterprise. The creators of Empire were Star Trek fans, all from the Midwest, all entering college in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The original idea came from John Daleske, a student at Iowa State University. An education professor there had heard about PLATO and arranged to get a terminal installed. A friend of Daleske’s then heard about the strange new terminal with its Friendly Orange Glow and urged Daleske to check it out. In the spring of 1973, Daleske did.
Born in 1953 in Des Moines, Daleske was playing around with computers long before college. In the eighth grade he built a tic-tac-toe–playing computer out of old relays. In high school he entered the science fair with his own design for a general-purpose computer. He learned to program in COBOL in the ninth grade and worked on an IBM 1401. He spent the summer after high school graduation in Finland on a student exchange program, then returned to enter Iowa State University in the fall of 1971, starting out as an aerospace engineering major. That fall he took a computer math course, where he programmed in BASIC on punched paper tape. He found the classwork so easy he’d finished all of his assignments wi
thin the first week of classes, and wound up being asked by the instructor to help teach the class. “Programming came easy to me,” he says. Before the aerospace engineering classes began in the spring of 1972, the departmental dean had discouraged him from pursuing it as a major. The students had been summoned to meet with the dean one day to get the lecture: “Unless you are willing to work with a close friend on a project for a year or two, then turn around and stab him in the back, this program is not for you,” the dean announced. The requirements: “You will not miss a single class in the sequence. Some of the classes are only provided once every four years. Miss one, and you’re out.”
“A very strict schedule with no alternatives,” Daleske says. He switched majors to distributive studies, “kind of like an honors program,” he says, winding up with “the equivalent of three majors: computer science, mathematics, and philosophy, with multiple minors.” The draft was still on in 1972 and people were still dying in Vietnam. Daleske was drafted and wound up spending the summer in boot camp with the Marines, but managed to return to college in the fall of 1972 to start his sophomore year.
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For all intents and purposes, Daleske had his own personal PLATO terminal. Few others had caught the PLATO bug yet at Iowa State, and no one else understood that the poor geek who spent his days and nights in front of that strange orange screen wasn’t hiding from society—he was right in the thick of it. It just happened to be online. He began arranging his class schedule around PLATO. He would have an early dinner at the dormitory, then dash over to the education building before the guards locked it. “I would stay in the room, with the lights off so that the guard would not know I was there,” says Daleske. He might sneak out for a pizza later in the night, and upon arriving back at the building find that picking the lock was easy, and he’d go back in. He did eventually get caught. “A couple of times,” he admits. But he kept coming back.
