by Brian Dear
Far more worrisome was the day he was summoned to the office of the dean of the School of Education. After his experience with the dean of the School of Aerospace Engineering, this was not something he was looking forward to. But to Daleske’s surprise, the education dean was not there to bust him, but rather to encourage him. “The dean gave me a letter indicating I could be in the building anytime I wanted and also gave me a key to the building,” says Daleske. “He said he didn’t want to have to replace the lock because I was wearing it out.”
At one point Daleske took a computer science course programming an IBM 360, a big, old, dull mainframe computer. Daleske wouldn’t be the last student, already contaminated—spoiled—by PLATO, to take a computer science course and not only find it tedious, but also get frustrated by the inept, old-school, dead-tree fan-fold printouts and noninteractive batch-job punch-card method of doing course assignments. My God, haven’t you seen the orange screen? Here, let me show you. He cut a deal with the professors, who let him use PLATO to do his homework. “The teachers loved it because this gave them a buffer of time to distribute to needy students,” he says. And in the process the Friendly Orange Glow cast its spell on a few of the CS professors as well, intrigued by the graphics capabilities of PLATO. This isn’t like our computers.
Soon he was back to spending all night on PLATO, alone in the education building. When CERL’s preventive maintenance period struck around 6 a.m. and kicked him off the system, he would stumble home and sleep a few hours until his classes began mid-morning. New games were beginning to spring up on PLATO all the time, as more and more people caught the game bug—if not playing games, then writing games. (One of the first commands you learned in TUTOR, especially if you were writing a game, was -randu-, which one used to generate random numbers. The -randu- command took on a bigger meaning over the years. It was the god of chance and luck. More than one PLATO person has been known to utter a wishful statement only to follow it with “Randu willing.”) Daleske tried out all the Big Board games. But he had also learned that people were writing them. At the time he was taking an education class that required students to do a project. Originally he was going to do a dull project like every other student taking the class. But as he explored PLATO it was clear he needed to change his project to be something PLATO-related. He needed disk space. Disk space on PLATO was so expensive that it was very carefully guarded, and it was difficult to get. Unfortunately, Daleske didn’t have access to any, or so he thought at the time (in fact, Iowa State would have provided him some, had he but asked), and he couldn’t simply go create some. He thought he needed outside help. So he went online and contacted a gamer in Indiana who was spending much of his life in front of the Orange Glow as well. His name was Silas Warner.
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Warner was born in 1949 in Chicago and moved to Bloomington, Indiana, in 1958. A fascination with computers beginning in the sixth grade continued through his undergraduate years in the late 1960s at Indiana University in Bloomington. “In theory I was a chemistry major,” Warner says, but he ultimately graduated with a degree in physics in 1970. He stayed on at the university into the early 1970s, working as a computer programmer for the psychology department.
One day, a “big iron box,” as Warner remembers it, arrived at the physics building. It was an early PLATO IV terminal without a touch screen panel. Another terminal arrived about two weeks later, for cannibalizing parts, in case the first one failed. “I got onto the PLATO system,” says Warner, “and started making it do things, and of course discovered, as many other people about the same time were discovering, that they thought they had invented an educational computer, when in fact what they had actually invented was the greatest pinball machine ever created up to that time.”
Four other terminals eventually wound up on campus, two in the education building and two in the journalism building. The journalism department was enthusiastic about PLATO, and had begun developing a number of instructional lessons, including some on cropping news photos, using PLATO’s microfiche slide projector and superimposed graphics. The slide mechanism in the terminal wasn’t very accurate and students first had to move a cursor onto some landmark in the photo to calibrate the terminal, and then do the cropping.
Warner had other issues with the microfiche projector in the terminals. “The real problem,” says Warner, “was that the slide mechanism required compressed air….Nobody had ever thought of putting a compressed air supply in a computer room. So the solution was to go to the chemistry department and get a couple of surplus gas bottles which originally held 3,000 psi of air, but were now down to 150 psi, screw a regulator on them, and attach each one to a plastic hose up to the slide projector. Well, of course, the air bottles wouldn’t last very long, if they were kept in continuous use. We had to tell students to turn on the valve and watch the pressure go up to the green mark before they started their lesson, and turn it off at the end. And of course they always forgot to turn it off at the end, so the air bottles ran out.” Warner got tired of having the air bottles run out on him. When he came in at night, he found the bottles empty. Or students would come in and find that the lessons wouldn’t work because there was no air pressure in the bottles. Out of frustration, Warner then invented what he called the “Backup Non-Automatic Microfiche Propulsion Module.” He took the hose off the slide projector and hooked it to a bicycle pump. Then he put a sign up on the wall:
IF SLIDE PROJECTOR STOPS,
TAKE FOUR STROKES ON BICYCLE PUMP,
AND GO BACK TO YOUR LESSON.
It worked!
—
And then there came the night that John Daleske contacted Silas Warner online via the Pad lesson. Daleske needed file space. Did Warner have any? “He was talking about this great game that he wanted to build,” Warner says. “Big Board games were the only thing out there and he wanted to get away from the Big Board concept altogether…a sort of mini-universe that would run more or less continuously.”
The idea had just come to Daleske one day, “just popped in,” he says. Silas gave him some file space and Daleske then spent five solid days designing and writing the first version of what he called Empire. He had to finish it in five days, in time for grading for the education class. He got it done, announced it online on PLATO, and played it for a couple of weeks. “Silas liked it,” says Daleske. “He provided some comments on the design, so we added a few features. This version was played during the summer while I redesigned parts to make it more interactive.”
But there was a problem: Daleske had only one lesson file (a fixed amount of disk space for a PLATO program) to make his changes, and that was the version that was live on the system available for people to play. “This made it very difficult to design, write, edit, and test, because this implied kicking off players periodically,” he says. Such was the nature of PLATO that when a lesson was updated or modified, it couldn’t be tested without first terminating the version of the program currently in use. To avoid annoying users he worked late into the night, just like CERL’s system staff, writing new code and fixing bugs. He would then test the system after the nightly PLATO system shutdown at 10 p.m. when it would stay down for about fifteen to thirty minutes, then come back up, in a new form—the “non-prime-time” form—with a different login screen, full of warnings about system maintenance and possibly unstable conditions meant to scare off students and instructors alike. This was development time. (And game time.)
The first version of Empire was primitive: one screen containing one “universe” consisting of eight planets. It only supported eight people at a time, but that was six more than any other game of the era. (Indeed, this first version of Empire may be the first graphical, interactive multiplayer computer game anywhere that supported more than two players simultaneously.) If you weren’t one of the lucky eight players, you had to settle for “lurking,” standing in line, watching the game from the outside.
That fall, Daleske and Warner decided to undertake a jour
ney, what was widely known to PLATO people as making the pilgrimage to Mecca. “Mecca” in this case was CERL. If you were a PLATO-holic around this time, no matter where you lived, no matter how much sacrifice you had to make, no matter what the cost in time, relationships, jobs, academic standing…you simply had to make the pilgrimage to see what this damn thing was all about. Daleske arranged to take a bus in Iowa east to “Chambana,” as some called Champaign-Urbana (also called “Shampoo-Banana” by some). Silas would hop on a bus from Indiana and head west. They would meet at the Illini Union, the student union building in the heart of the UI campus. Daleske, at nearly six foot three and broad-shouldered, was stunned to meet the imposing figure of Warner in person. Daleske recalls Warner having to “almost bend down and turn a bit sideways” when he went through the doorway at the Illini Union, “and these were Union doors. I felt significantly dwarfed.” Warner was six foot nine and weighed over three hundred pounds.
They went and found CERL and discovered rooms full of PLATO terminals. “It was like going to computer-geek heaven,” says Daleske. The keyboards on some of the PLATO IV terminals at Illinois were newer, with little bumps added on the F and J index-finger keys for touch-typists (many keyboards today still have those bumps). Silas would have none of it. He hated the bumps, and they had to go. For every terminal he sat down to work on, he’d chip the little plastic dots away, shaving them off until the keys were smooth.
Warner and Daleske discussed Empire game design ideas but mostly spent the time play-testing the game and observing how other PLATO users played it. Daleske noticed that whenever Warner hit a lull when he was working on PLATO, he would reach into a pocket, pull out a book, and read a few pages. Then he’d put it back, and do some more work. After a while he would reach into a different pocket, pull out a different book, and start reading from that. This CERL pilgrimage marked the only time that Daleske and Warner would meet face-to-face.
Back home, and as time wore on, they began having differing ideas of what direction to take Empire. Silas preferred sticking to the original design, evolving it over time, but not changing the basic gameplay. He wanted multiple universes, not just one, so that more people could play the game, and there’d be more game to play. They decided to make a copy of the game, and Silas’s version would be called Conquest, letting it take on a life of its own while Daleske took Empire in a different direction.
“In the first version of Empire,” Warner says, “eight players could play against each other. They were not allied in any way.” No Klingons, Feds, Romulans, or Orions—all that would come later. “Just players, one to a planet. They were in fact controllers of each planet.” Like later versions of Empire, the first version of the game had little icons representing the spaceships. But instead of piloting the spaceships, players would simply direct the spaceship to go from one planet to another, and when a ship arrived at another planet, a player could trade with that planet, or fight with that planet, or drop bombs, and so forth. Spaceship combat was automatic: if two spaceships got within a certain distance you would either have the choice of passing or fighting. If they fought, the battle was automatic. “That version of Empire was actually continued after the second version, under the name Conquest,” Silas recalls. His version evolved to support six universes, each a sort of separate level of the game, where you could jump from one to the other. “Usually, universe 1 was always full,” Warner recalls. “Universe 2 was sort of halfway there, and there might be a pickup, an arranged game, in universe 4.”
—
Daleske kept at it, redesigning and improving the game, sometimes making changes that players didn’t like. As time went on, the Iowa State campus got a few more PLATO terminals, the education building having two, and the computer science building having its own two. Other Iowa State students had caught the PLATO bug, including Mike Rodby, Chuck Miller, and Gary Fritz.
Miller had entered Iowa State in the fall of 1970. Fritz arrived in the fall of 1974, and started using PLATO by using someone else’s signon, not realizing that was a serious no-no. “I was so naive,” Fritz says. “At one point I found out who Mike Rodby was and I was talking to him and everything, and I said, ‘Oh, here, I’ve got an author login, you want to use it?’ And he said, ‘Wait a minute! That’s mine!’ ”
Daleske taught them TUTOR. “I sat by his shoulder,” Miller says, “and said, Why’d you do that? and Why’d you do that? Whatcha doing there? and kind of learned how to program on PLATO from him.” Fritz went through a similar apprenticeship. “It started out with me being the wide-eyed newbie at his knee,” says Fritz. “He was explaining all the concepts of game writing and stuff like that, and I remember really clearly the time when I suggested a way to do something and he said, ‘How do you do that?’ and I said, ‘You mean you don’t know how to do that?’ and he said ‘No, I’ve never heard of this.’ And I said, Wowwww.” For Fritz it was like graduating to be Daleske’s equal, his peer. From then on, he says, “we taught each other a lot of stuff.
“We had a really good connection,” Fritz says. “There was something that we had been trying to come up with a solution to something….We had just been talking along for hours and just kind of ran out of steam and we were just kind of sitting there staring into space and frustrated and all of a sudden at the same second we both looked up and I said, ‘Hey! What if!’ and he said, ‘You’re right! That’ll work!’ and I said, ‘Let’s go do it!’ We had the exact same idea and we never said a word, but we knew what we were talking about.”
Daleske ran into another problem: getting printouts of Empire’s TUTOR source code. They kept magically walking away. If you wanted to print out your code, you had to submit a request through the system, which would eventually cause a printer inside the CERL building to spew forth a stack of fanfold paper with your code printed on it. These printouts would be put on a desk and eventually picked up if you were on campus, or mailed out if you were elsewhere. But, given the nature of the thing being printed in this case, and the fact that some of the operators at CERL loved Empire, the Empire prints would often disappear, never to arrive in Iowa, or would arrive very late. For some, a printout of Empire was as good as legal tender. “I was rewriting at one point and did not receive a listing for about two months, until I complained and learned what was happening,” Daleske says. Legend has it that many PLATO games got started after their authors first got hold of a printout of Empire’s source code.
The printout delays were so bad that Daleske finally had enough, and started memorizing the code. Every single line. “I recall one bizarre episode where I was sleeping and I think Gary called in the middle of the night with something needing fixing,” Daleske says. Right from memory he told Fritz which exact line of code to go to in which exact section of the program. “Gave him the fix and went back to sleep.”
—
Daleske continued to expand and modify Empire into what some players felt was an increasingly complex game. One version was far more strategic, supporting a hundred simultaneous users, but some players, including Chuck Miller, missed the arcade-like aspects of an earlier version. Miller decided to create a more action-oriented Empire in a lesson file he had available called “michelin.” By 1976, Daleske saw that Miller and now Gary Fritz were onto something with Michelin, and the decision was made to create a new version of Empire that merged the ideas of Michelin with one of Daleske’s more action-oriented versions from a few years earlier. The result was Empire IV, and this turned out to be the biggest hit of all. At least, it had the potential to be: but the PLATO system was not quite designed to handle the demand the game put on the CYBER mainframe.
PLATO being a time-sharing system meant that everyone using it was allotted only a small slice of CPU time at any one moment. For students using PLATO for its intended purpose this was generally not a problem, as most PLATO lessons were fairly modest in terms of the computer resources they consumed. The system had what could be described as a “governor,” to limit how big a CPU tim
e slice was allocated to each user: that way no single user could monopolize the precious resources of the system. The limit was set at 20 TIPS (thousands of instructions per second) per user. There were two processing modes: foreground and background. You could switch between the two modes by doing a TERM-foregnd or TERM-backgnd. “Foreground” mode attempted to guarantee the user a certain level of CPU performance as long as your average TIPS didn’t exceed the limit. “Background” mode users got what was left over from the foreground users on the system. Most of the time, that was the thing to do if you were a gamer, so most gamers did a TERM-backgnd as soon as they entered a CPU-intensive game like Empire. To help users switch into background or foreground as needed, the Empire authors added TERM-b and TERM-f to the game, so they wouldn’t have to type as many letters.
Users needed to maintain an average of less than 20 TIPS in order to work without sudden interruptions. For PLATO game players, maintaining an average of 20 TIPS was always a problem—there was just not enough horsepower. The bane of PLATO game players was the dreaded autobreak, which is what the “governor” would do to the program you were running once it exceeded the TIPS limit: your terminal just froze. It might freeze for just a fraction of a second, or it might freeze for several seconds at a time—you never knew beforehand. When you’re surrounded by hyperjump-happy oreo cookies (as the Orion ships and torpedoes were often called) as well as Fed torpedoes and phasers from Klingons and the action’s furiously hot, the last thing you want is for your terminal to lock up, especially when it’s just to share the central computer’s scarce resources with students and people doing serious things on the system.
