The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Who could have predicted that this would be the fate of so hallowed a chamber as the very birthplace of PLATO, where brilliant, serious men and women dreamed of a better future for students (and teachers), a future in which education could be freed and transformed by a new apparatus that they themselves had designed and had built, and would teach anything to anyone because it was infinitely flexible, infinitely patient, infinitely knowledgeable? A machine that delivered on the promise of Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback. Only, for this crowd, those principles applied to games. And now, the ILLIAC had been carted away, dismantled, obsolete, gone, and forgotten. The machine room that was its home turned into a geek habitat surrounded by the same old cinder block walls, with fluorescent lights overhead and the ancient squares of linoleum tile on the floor below. The Zoo was now not so much a room as a throbbing darkened hive from which wafted an indistinct and not quite pleasant mix of vapors arising from unseen and long-forgotten food crumbs, sweaty body odor, pizza breath, onion breath, cheeseburger breath, Pepsi and Mountain Dew belches, and worse; on some tables and on the linoleum-tiled floor, here and there in darkened corners roach motels, some with vacancies, some not; the occasional crumb from a Pop-Tart, the essential nutrition of Zoo inhabitants when pizza was not available; and everywhere creaky wooden chairs situated in front of ancient wooden library tables underneath which decades of chewing gum and who knows what other grime had, like a boat’s barnacles, accumulated, and on top of which rested bulky metal boxes propped up on “precision angle adjusters” (also known as four-by-four blocks of wood)—boxes out the back of which ran various thick cables leading to the fourth floor, where the CYBER hummed in its chilled-air sanctum. Connected to the front were equally bulky keyboards and heavily fingerprinted touch-sensitive display screens, from which emanated the Orange Glow. The Zoo, where instead of the incessant musical chimes of a casino’s gambling machines one heard the nonstop clickety-clackety-bang of fingers on keyboards, frantically defending planets, firing phasers and photon torpedoes, shooting down enemy aircraft, attacking monsters in the dungeon, chatting and flirting in the Talko channels, and writing snarky messages in the notesfiles. The Zoo, which shared much in common with a casino: no windows, no sense of time, perpetual play. The only difference being that in the Zoo, the steady drain of currency was not from spent dollars and coins; the patrons of the Zoo came here and spent their youth, and the House (in this case, the Power House), always won.

  The Zoo at night Credit 31

  Only when one stepped back into “the corridor,” that narrow hallway that passed from one faraway end of CERL to the other, did one have any chance of escape back into the real world. But why would you do that?

  —

  B. F. Skinner had cherished his experience with Mary Graves, his legendary grade school teacher, whom he had described as “someone who listened to me, answered my questions, and almost always had something interesting to say or a suggestion of something interesting to do.” In the 1970s, for many students who discovered PLATO and who became denizens of the Zoo, the PLATO system, its online community, its ever-growing catalog of lessons, notesfiles, games, and countless other activities, had become a different kind of Mary Graves. Instead of PLATO being the ultimate online teacher at the ultimate online Academy, rivaling that of the Greek figure for whom the system was named, a digital place to come and learn about everything from anthropology to zoology, PLATO had become, for so many young people, a place to come and learn about PLATO. A place to learn about each other. The system itself was the thing. If you had a voracious appetite for learning—if you had somehow, somewhere in your life learned how to learn, and derived joy from the experience of learning, then when it came to PLATO, the most fascinating learning of all was the system itself. The system, and its online community, had become a cyber-proxy for that long-lost someone who listened to you, answered your questions, and almost always had something interesting to say or a suggestion of something interesting to do. And it’s been that way ever since. In 2017, PLATO may be gone, but the phenomenon is still here, only now gargantuan in scale, changing humanity, changing the earth, no turning back.

  Who needs Mary Graves when you’ve got the Net?

  —

  Why did CERL tolerate the gamers? Why did Bitzer? They could have been banned in an instant. Many other PLATO classroom sites, both on campus and remote, had banned games outright. This was an expensive system, and sites that had PLATO paid dearly to utilize these precious resources. The mission was education, not entertainment. So why, then, did the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory, of all things, the very home of PLATO itself, not view games and gamers as a pestilence?

  The answer lies with Bitzer and Alpert. They both shared an enlightened, permissive attitude that had benefited CERL and CSL before it. Alpert was not afraid of discovering bright young capable people and mixing them with senior engineers, physicists, and other researchers to collaborate on projects. Bitzer had the same philosophy, which had served him so well from the very earliest days of PLATO. Without Andrew Hanson’s brilliant work as a teenager writing the multitasking operating system enhancements to PLATO III, Bitzer might have had a far more difficult time making progress in the 1960s. Likewise, the work of Mike Walker, Rick Blomme, Scott Krueger, David Frankel, David Woolley, Kim and Phil Mast, Mark Rustad, Doug Brown, Marshall Midden, Brand Fortner, John Matheny, Ray Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen, and dozens of other young people brought capability to the PLATO system for next to nothing in terms of cost to CERL’s bottom line. Sure, sometimes gamers could get unruly, but sometimes the overnight madhouse gaming activity exposed flaws in the system hardware or software that could be conveniently discovered while the real business of PLATO—giving students an education—was at home asleep. By morning, problems could be fixed, to the benefit of those same students.

  Not everyone on the senior CERL staff was happy with the gaming situation. Bruce Sherwood thought they wasted resources. William Golden, known as William “No” Golden for his often saying “no” to anyone asking for a signon or file space, was not a big fan of the gamers and game authors. But Bitzer had a more moderate view of the scene. He was impressed with the games, and from time to time played some of them himself. A good tech visionary knows that half his job is selling, and Bitzer was a master salesman: cool, confident, and knowing just what rabbit to pull out of his bag of tricks depending on the situation. Thus on occasion he had begun demoing games, notesfiles, pnotes, TERM-talk, and Talkomatic. Like Steve Jobs and Apple would do years later with the iPhone, the sheer volume and variety of applications created on PLATO were dazzling in demo settings.

  But still, not everyone was happy with the games or the gamers. “I would get a lot of reports,” Bitzer says. “You know, ‘We ought to do something about this.’ ‘We ought to do something about that.’ But I didn’t—if they weren’t doing any damage, I didn’t see any reason to stop creative people from expressing their creativity.”

  Ray Ozzie called Bitzer’s philosophy “subversive innovation.” It was an attitude that permeated much of CERL, starting with being open and welcoming to any visitor. If you were a student wandering into the building only to become fascinated with what you were seeing on a first visit, you would invariably come back, seeking out more knowledge. You’d learn it was possible to program in TUTOR. You might go the gamer route, you might not. You might be struck by how so many people were building useful things in the lab. “Not everyone was a gamer,” says Ozzie. “Not everyone spent as much time in all of the different notesfiles that were out there.” Indeed, Ozzie wanted to program more than goof around, and he invented a path for himself, discovering the next-generation PLATO V terminal that Jack Stifle’s team was working on, learning that they had added a microprocessor to it, making it an early personal computer. Why not write programs that executed locally inside the terminal’s microprocessor? “I went to Tenczar,” says Ozzie, “and said, ‘I can make this thing! Downloadable, you know? I’ll do this, I
’ll do that, I’ll do that, I’ll do that!’ ” Before he knew it, Tenczar gave him the go-ahead, and Ozzie was being paid to work on a bona fide CERL project to create a new tool called “pptasm,” the PLATO Programmable Terminal Assembler. “Tenczar was my entry point, and I convinced him that I could do this stuff, and I did….I wrote an assembler and a loader and all this stuff.” Ozzie found that Blomme was not keen on people writing assembly language to make things happen locally on a PLATO terminal, and pptasm did not make much of a direct impact in the long run. But it did spur Blomme and others to think about programming in a microprocessor version of TUTOR: what if one could write TUTOR lessons and have them run locally, instead of on the mainframe? In time the work done on pptasm would eventually lead to MicroTUTOR, which Control Data would market as Micro PLATO in the 1980s. It was a classic example of how CERL’s subversive innovation led to important advances that eventually made a difference out in the world.

  Likewise, the authors of many of the multiplayer games that kept the denizens of the Zoo glued to their terminals every night learned a great deal about programming and computers by creating those games. That knowledge gave them skills that they took into their subsequent careers. Those careers sometimes were at CERL or at Control Data, or elsewhere, including eventually Atari, Apple, Google, and other Silicon Valley companies. For Bitzer, for CERL, all the gamer fuss was worth it. Limit gaming to off-hours, but don’t ban it outright. The new wave of high school and college kids that poured into CERL in the 1970s brought many brilliant minds to the lab, and that brilliance was put to use in ways no one could have predicted.

  —

  Richard Powers was a denizen of the Zoo during CERL’s peak years in the late 1970s, drawn there for the same reason everyone else was drawn there. What else were you going to do? How could you not be drawn there? The same Richard Powers who in more recent years has become a major literary figure, a novelist who has garnered sweeping acclaim and won so many prestigious awards, including a MacArthur “genius” grant and, in 2006, the National Book Award for Fiction. Several of his most well-known novels, including Galatea 2.2, The Gold Bug Variations, and Plowing the Dark, directly confront issues related to computers and human-machine interaction. “Man,” he would recall years later, thinking back on PLATO, “I spent more timeless hours in those rooms than I can say, and I remember coming back out sometimes after a long session, shocked to discover daylight or the lack thereof, just out the doors of CERL.” The enticement of that Orange Glow could be downright scary. “I can remember coming back from a bunch of all-night sessions, and feeling, This is a very dangerous, very powerful drug, and you better be careful. I mean, the closest I’ve ever felt to addiction was probably sitting on that system.”

  But sit on that system he did, and for several years. “The psychology of computer use in all my digitally inflected books,” says Powers, “derives from my initial experience of that strange public/private hybrid network mentality of PLATO. I so often felt that the years from 1978, when I left U of I to become a writer, until about 1993, when I came back [to Urbana] to write Galatea—which I think must be one of the very first works of fiction to describe a web browser—were spent waiting for the world to catch up to the possibilities inherent in the system that I had grown up on.”

  Powers had enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in 1975, majoring in physics. It was there that not only did he find PLATO, but as was the case with countless other high school and college kids, PLATO found him. “I can without exaggeration say that the system changed my life,” Powers says. “I can’t say that I would not have become a novelist if it weren’t for PLATO, but I certainly would not have become the novelist that I became….PLATO was my first exposure to the man-machine interaction and it not only was the place where I was able to program, and was subsequently able to make a living doing that while becoming a writer, but it was the place where I first saw what might change in the human mind when given a kind of blank-slate playground in which to extend itself.”

  Like so many thousands of students who attended UI, he first came across the system through his regular classwork. A professor here or there would give his class an assignment that required visiting a special classroom somewhere on campus where students would interact with lessons, simulations, and quizzes online on the PLATO system. It was here that Powers succumbed to the spell of the Orange Glow. He discovered that not only was he learning his course material through a machine, through PLATO, but he also wanted to learn more about PLATO, the machine, the phenomenon, itself. This did not happen to every student who would enter those special PLATO classrooms. Most, in fact, came in, sat down, did their work, and were done. The Orange Glow may have tickled their fancy, but not enough to want to know where the glow came from and what lay at the other end of those thick cables coming out of the back of the machine.

  “My memory is that my first discovery that there were more things under the hood,” Powers recalls, “came about when sitting in these labs. There would be twenty or thirty terminals in a lab, and I would be working on a physics problem set, and the person next to me would be working on a physics problem set, and the person next to him might be playing this intergalactic game of planetary conquest. Of course, I wanted to know how he got on that. So there was a preliminary gradual discovery that a roomful of people could be involved in all sorts of mysterious applications, some graphical, and on occasion I would see someone there with a headset on, and there’d be clearly an audio component going on that I wasn’t aware of.”

  The first forays, he says, were casual glances over the shoulders of others, causing him to wonder how they got to the activity they were in on their terminals and how could he conjure up that same activity on his terminal? What magical incantations were necessary? “I would lean over,” says Powers, “and ask somebody, How’d you get in there? and they’d act very secretively, and say, well, you know, you just have to be an author, or you have to have X privileges, and I would try poking around, using my student account, and find out where it would take me.”

  Then Powers discovered multiples. Multiples were a type of PLATO user signon designed to be used anonymously—and simultaneously—by anyone. Pretty much every other PLATO signon was unique: only that one person could sign on using that name and group combination. But with a multiple, lots of people could use it. Typically created for demonstrations and for curious visitors, multiples were generic signons consisting often of “demo” as the signon’s name and “demo” or something similar as the group, perhaps also with a password of “demo” if there was even a password at all. Entering the system using a multiple signon might yield access to catalogs of lessons that weren’t available to the average student who simply was there to do his or her class assignment, be it in physics, chemistry, veterinary medicine, or French. Some catalogs would open doors to lessons in those subjects and more. Some catalogs might provide access to lessons about PLATO itself: how to use it, how it worked, what made it run, how it was programmed, and how you could program it too. These special multiple-type signons were the easiest to find out about. Powers would use them, take them as far as they would go, to explore “these little nested networks that would open up for a while, and you’d kind of tunnel in there and get hold of whatever information or secrets you could find and they’d close up again. The next time you’d come to the site it would say, ‘Sorry, we don’t allow that signon here.’

  “One of the early fascinations that has stayed for me,” Powers says, “is the discovery that the same interface that I looked at all day long to do my problem sets and my lessons could, with a certain set of key combinations, open up a little rabbit-hole, and produce surprise entry points into layers that were behind or alongside that. When it’s your first introduction to the fluidity, the fungibility, and the multiple layers of computer interface, it’s mind-changing.”

  —

  Directly across the corridor from the Zoo was a small office where the PLATO system
operators worked. Situating the system operators’ office on the first floor of CERL while the machine room with the CYBER and communications equipment was up on the fourth floor made little sense at first glance. But the operators were responsible for more than just keeping the system running, routinely backing up data, and managing printout requests: they were also tasked with a job no one else wanted, keeping an eye on the Zoo. In a way, that was their most important job: they were the Zoo police, enforcing rules about who could be there and what those people were allowed to be doing. The rules were different during the day versus during the night.