The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Parrello came across the PLATO community in October 1973, just as it was exploding. The initial version of Notes was up and running, as was Talkomatic. TERM-talk would be released in a few weeks. Pad was running. Stuart Umpleby’s Watergate debate was at the time the hot topic in Discuss. Big Board PLATO games were rampant. Parrello discovered that people were using colorful pseudonyms, especially when they listed themselves in Big Board games like Moonwar and Dogfight. Rick Blomme was known to all as “Red Baron” in Dogfight, so Parrello decided as a joke to call himself “Red Sweater.”

  The name stuck.

  Parrello says his monochrome wardrobe “bled over into my personal life.” Some PLATO people weren’t buying his explanation. One went so far as to write up an elaborate “Origin of the Red Sweater” legend, a tale that told of young Parrello, in high school, encountering an alien entity in a field. The entity took over Parrello’s mind, so this story went, and forced him to wear this same red sweater every day of the year.

  Red Sweater’s reputation online grew as the weeks went by. He participated in Umpleby’s impeachment debate in Discuss. “Red Sweater,” as he identified himself in Discuss, defended Nixon and his cohorts, and refuted many of Umpleby’s more liberal arguments. Unlike most Illinois undergrads in the early 1970s, Parrello was a self-described “right-wing nut,” fiercely holding to conservative viewpoints that he was not afraid to dish out in generous portions when interacting with other PLATO users. “I was the only Republican,” says Parrello. “I was very important to the process.” He attacked Umpleby’s assertion that Nixon and Watergate were somehow tied to the JFK assassination. But he was not without his own conspiracy theories. An example of Parrello’s point of view from Sunday, October 21, 1973, as posted in Discuss:

  When Ellsberg or Berrigan, etc. break into someplace or a student burns a draft file, we are told that one’s conscience supersedes the law. Ehrlichman and crew believe what they were doing was right. Is the criterion of Civil Disobedience and the end justifying the means only for the left?…

  [Richard Nixon] was engaged in a fierce budget battle with Congress. Notice how a fierce budget battle has suddenly been declared a loss by the Executive branch? You may draw your own conclusions.

  Red Sweater also often hung out in Pad. He had an eye for odd newspaper stories and for stories that contradicted other newspaper stories, and these observations would prompt him to post something online. He once read about two separate studies on children and learning. One study showed that children in the sixth grade and younger could not learn grammar, while another study showed that students in the seventh grade and older were too old to learn grammar. “So basically,” Parrello says, “if you put the studies together, which of course no one did, you could conclude that no one could ever learn grammar because they’re too young to understand it, or too old to care.”

  Pad’s limited message length was starting to become an annoyance. “I couldn’t fit them all in,” Parrello said. “So I decided to write my own lesson as a newspaper.” He began looking for a way to get some disk space with which he could build his own Pad clone enabling him to write longer messages. The way to get some space in this era of little space was to steal it, or grovel to the CERL higher-ups like Bill “No” Golden. But if one looked hard enough, and asked around enough, one would sometimes get lucky and find an abandoned lesson or two. Parrello eventually found two such files, “fr2” and “temperatur.” He’d typed “temperature” at the Author Mode, but the arrow on the Author Mode allowed for a maximum of ten characters, so it came out as “temperatur.” Bingo. “They were just lessons that nobody was using,” Parrello says. “They were empty disk space that hadn’t been password-protected or anything, and that the owners forgot about…so I just moved in.” He began coding. Sherwin Gooch eventually changed the “fr2” file name to the more reasonable “newsreport.” Thus, the service—offered only through PLATO, but an online news service nonetheless, long before that concept would become familiar to the world—came to be known as “News Report.”

  What began as a way for Parrello to have more freedom to express his views online quickly became what may be the first instance of an online newspaper and first instance of a blog years before blogs existed. (If predecessors exist, years of research has not revealed them.) From a present-day vantage point, News Report was a hybrid: both online newspaper and blog, which is remarkable when one considers that years later these two phenomena would evolve differently, often at odds with each other; but in Red Sweater’s case, right from the very start News Report had attributes of both. It was a curated, online source of news to PLATO users, and it was a digital soapbox from which blared the clear, unmistakable voice (crazed ranting, to some) of his Red Sweater persona. When one visited News Report, what one immediately saw was prominent branding for “The Red Sweater News Service.” The resemblance to the core structure of many online publications today, particularly political ones like The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, and Drudge Report, is uncanny, although News Report’s focus was more on the offbeat than the national headlines. Parrello used News Report as a way to poke fun at the daily absurdities of life. “We looked for the strange and the unusual,” Parrello says. “If you could take a story that wasn’t front-page, but was interesting and funny, that was sort of the ideal thing.”

  He started each day by going to the drugstore to buy some newspapers and then go over to McDonald’s. “I would pore through them and find stories that I thought were different or interesting. I also subscribed to a couple of magazines.” News Report started out with two daily columns, “The Morning Report” and “Today’s Headlines.” “The Morning Report was real news,” Parrello says, “and Today’s Headlines was generally three or four really bizarre stories that I had turned up….I wanted it to be in place by a certain time each morning, so that people would know that, hey, if I log in at eight o’clock I’ll be able to read the Morning Report and Today’s Headlines.”

  Some days it was hard to face the inevitable chore, that many bloggers years later would face, of having to stare at a computer screen and force himself to post a new article as quickly as possible for a waiting audience. Some days he didn’t want to get up. “I’d lay in bed,” he says, “and hope that the whole system would just break down.”

  He’d have to get to CERL to use a terminal, and his preferred terminals were upstairs in 203A and B, the author rooms. Unfortunately, they were typically locked from 5 p.m. until 7 a.m., and he lacked a key. Worse yet, when the rooms were open, he found he was unwelcome: only authors doing “serious work” were allowed access. He was kicked out several times. “I considered it a responsibility, not a game,” says Parrello, but others saw it differently. It did help that many of CERL’s junior systems programmers were within a few years of his own age—plus and, in some cases, minus—and were fans and loyal News Report readers. “One systems programmer is really picky,” Parrello would tell a Daily Illini reporter in 1975, “and whenever I get something wrong, he tells me. Makes you appreciate what a real newspaper goes through.”

  “We all eagerly waited every morning for his news,” says Fred Banks, a UI student during this time. “He would spend about forty-five minutes with the local paper, and write his version of the news. It was very entertaining, I don’t remember him demeaning anyone, or taking a right- or left-wing slant on the news. He was a great writer. One thing about the PLATO people, it could get very vicious if you have a grammar or spelling error.”

  Parrello loved offbeat stories. “There was this police station,” he says, “that had a problem with a mouse that kept getting into the drug cabinet, and they tried putting rat poison and traps in it and he’d go straight for the marijuana and ignore the poison and the cheese.” The station was in San Jose, California, and the cops named the mouse “Marty.” In December 1974 the cops, having successfully “nabbed” the mouse, put him in a cage and kept him there in the narcotics department as a mascot. “We think he’s earned the righ
t to live,” said a detective at the time. “He’s being held without bail. No hearing has been set.” The mouse lived for two more years. When it died, the police held a funeral, and two thousand people showed up. Newspapers across the country ran the story. It was the kind of story that Red Sweater loved to tell, and News Report became the platform through which to tell it.

  News Report quickly developed a following, particularly because of Parrello’s sense of humor. His literary theatrics did two things well: they attracted eyeballs and they raised eyebrows. His rants about some public figures, like Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin, were “epic,” says Dave Fuller. Looking back on his PLATO experience years later, Gary Fritz would say, “I remember RS’s editorial copy projecting the image of a fire-breathing pit bull. Imagine Dan Rather on steroids and you start to get the picture.”

  “I was very conservative,” says Parrello, “and I was surrounded by people who thought that people like me must be nuts. But in those days the political bickering was not so awful as it is today. I mean, I could disagree with people and we could still be friends. We weren’t calling each other Nazis and stuff….There were several people on the staff who were extremely liberal, I was extremely conservative, but we tried to keep the fighting out of it. And I insisted that all the articles had to be accurate.”

  —

  Like many PLATO game authors, Parrello copied the practice that had begun on PLATO back in its earliest ILLIAC I days, of collecting extensive data about his program’s usage: what would on today’s Web would be called “analytics.” He found that on a typical day he had about four hundred readers visiting, which, considering the size of the CERL PLATO system at the time, was a formidable accomplishment. (Today the rough equivalent would be to have a few hundred million people visiting one’s website every day.) Keeping tabs on user behavior produced some interesting findings, as it always did on PLATO and does today on the Internet. “It was kind of a joke,” Parrello says, “that when I didn’t do my column, the circulation would go up, because people would come back to see if it was there, but late. So I used to joke that the circulation always doubled when I didn’t do anything.”

  With News Report, Parrello had found an effective personal platform for expression. But the platform had its problems. One, the code was troublesome, “primarily because TUTOR was always changing,” says Parrello. At first News Report was unreliable and prone to lockups and crashes. He struggled to find a way to organize the data such that he could be editing new articles while readers were busy reading old ones, without the program corrupting both the incomplete new article and the old articles. He had designed the program so that it knew articles were articles, and knew that letters to the editor were letters to the editor, and once you were done reading an article, you could proceed on to the next article in sequence, as opposed to inadvertently being jumped straight to a letter to the editor. It took two versions of the program before he figured out the right mechanism to make it all work.

  File space on PLATO was always scarce, but Parrello was eager to snap any up that became available through legitimate means or was the result of further scrounging. Eventually the fact that he was squatting on two files that weren’t his got out. “The owners came to me and said, We’ll let you keep them,” he says. “[News Report] had become a ‘thing’ at that point, and it really would have been noticeable to pull the plug.”

  “Periodically a space would fall through the cracks,” says Parrello, “and I think News Report eventually ended up being three lessons. One was the main lesson itself, one was the database, and then there was another lesson that had some subroutines that wouldn’t fit in the main one. And that last one was called ‘god.’ ”

  The Author Mode had an interesting behavior when it came to missing file names. “Choose a lesson,” it declared, underneath which appeared an input arrow. So you typed in something at the arrow, pressed NEXT, and off you went. Except when you made a typo, or typed in the name of a lesson or file that did not exist. In which case, the Author Mode appended the phrase “no Does not exist” to the right of whatever you’d typed in. This led to much merriment by bored users. One day Parrello discovered that “god” did not exist: if he typed in “god” at the Author Mode, the system came back and said, “no,” followed by spaces and then, “Does not exist.”

  “I went to the woman who ran the Hebrew department,” he says, “and I said, ‘Do you know if you type in the word ‘god,’ it says, ‘no Does not exist’?’ ” Needless to say, he was successful convincing her that “god” should exist. Let there be “god,” and suddenly, it existed, and Parrello saw that it was good. He even went so far as to write some TUTOR code so that if you ran lesson “god” normally, it displayed some legitimate Bible verse. But behind the scenes, “the rest of it was all News Report stuff,” he says.

  —

  “As we grew,” Parrello says, “I started having different types of articles: there were columns, and features, and each had specific capabilities that made them behave differently. Articles were supposed to be hard news, and features were supposed to be more cultural things. A column was like a single thing that would be updated periodically, and so it would not move in the database, but it would be constantly resequenced each time it was updated.”

  Now that Parrello had articles, letters to the editor, and columns, all coming in from different users and at different times of day, readers might discover content appearing at all hours. One never knew when something new would appear in News Report. Unlike print publications, but just like a blog or the online edition of, say, The New York Times, from the reader’s perspective, new content just showed up. “That’s what makes [News Report] the newspaper of the future,” Parrello told a Daily Illini reporter in 1975. “Sure, radios can do this, but you have to turn them on at a certain time. With the News, you can have the new articles at any time you want.” The public, let alone the newspaper industry, would not figure this out for years to come.

  News Report would not remain a one-man operation for long. Parrello soon handpicked a small team of writers to help him out. Only work approved by Parrello would be published. “This allowed us to easily scoop The Daily Illini on stories we covered in common,” says Al Groupe. “Of course, we all were rather busy, so the paper wasn’t terribly ‘thick,’ but it was quite a trip when we reported on a fire on campus one weekend that the D-I didn’t report until the following Tuesday.”

  Parrello, who served as editor, with his own set of special powers in the News Report program, gave a handful of users “reporter” access, the base level of access required to submit a story. Groupe and Parrello tried to get real press passes for News Report’s reporters. “Since we were trying to be a legitimate news outlet,” recalls Groupe, “I suggested that we try to get press credentials so that we wouldn’t get hassled by the cops while covering a story. One day Bruce and I walked into downtown Champaign to visit the police and see about getting press passes. We ended up talking to the chief, but couldn’t get him to understand the concept.”

  “You mean you have to go to a computer terminal to read your ‘paper’?” the flummoxed chief asked.

  Their reply: “You mean you have to go to a newsstand to get your paper?”

  No luck. “We just couldn’t get over that hump,” Groupe recalls, “and we walked back empty-handed.”

  By March 1975, Parrello had rewritten the code for News Report four times, and he was so proud of the code, in a move that foretold the Open Source movement that would explode on the Internet two decades later, he made it inspectable by other users so anyone could see and copy it. Parrello gained a reputation as an excellent programmer. The service now had over one thousand regular readers and featured some twenty reporters, who operated with a lot of freedom, many of them using the program as a platform for their own creative ideas. John David Eisenberg, who was a full-time PLATO programmer and occasionally submitted material to News Report, considered the editorial policy “the most free of any news
paper around.” Parrello considered News Report to be “a family newspaper” and policed for material he deemed “too dangerous.” Parrello also considered himself sole editor, as he felt almost no one knew “how to spell or punctuate.”

  Tom Grohne was one “reporter” who submitted a popular series of humor stories called “Specs Nookno, P.I.,” hard-boiled detective fiction in the manner of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. Specs Nookno was named after the -specs nookno- TUTOR command, which “specified” to the system that it should not display the usual “ok” or “no” feedback messages to students after they typed an answer at an arrow prompt on the screen. Grohne’s Specs Nookno was a tough guy, a private eye like Hammer, but one, says Parrello, “with absolutely no brains.” Imagine Inspector Clouseau meets Firesign Theatre’s Nick Danger. The Specs Nookno stories, none of which have apparently survived, were an instant hit, causing many laugh-out-loud situations in otherwise quiet PLATO classrooms. If there was one problem with the stories, Parrello says, it was that “there were never enough of them.” The stories took a lot out of Grohne to write. He told Parrello once that it required “sending his mind into a completely strange place in order to do them.” At one point, there was a long delay between Specs Nookno stories, and the reading public clamored for more. Some Cornell pranksters posted a letter to the editor saying that they had Specs Nookno and would not give him back until certain demands were met. “That went on for a while,” says Parrello. “Finally Grohne was able to get his mind into the strange place again and Specs Nookno came back.”