The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Other News Report reporters found their own successful niches. One contributor offered a column entitled “Saucy Wit and Droll Caprice,” which covered, says Parrello, “idiotic behavior by politicians, which in those days generally involved hookers, alcohol, and car wrecks.” The 1974 scandal involving Congressman Wilbur Mills and a stripper named Fannie Fox was one target of “Saucy Wit.” Another was the 1976 affair involving Ohio congressman Wayne Hays and his mistress Elizabeth Ray. John David Eisenberg contributed a mock-pious column called “Sermonette” that offered funny essays on various issues and events like Thanksgiving. There was a “Poetry Corner,” featuring works by various users, including Sherwin Gooch. (“Weird poetry,” says Parrello, “otherwise we would not have allowed it.”) There was a regular science fiction column. The legendary game creator Silas Warner, out at Indiana University, contributed an offline module to News Report to report the live standings for the Indianapolis 500 race. “I did a lot of Indianapolis 500 reporting for them,” Warner said. Dave Fuller submitted various technical articles that attempted in a lighthearted way to explain the various components of the PLATO system. Fuller’s articles emulated the manner of the popular “I Am Joe’s Kidney” series of anatomy articles from Reader’s Digest: “I Am PLATO’s CPU,” “I Am PLATO’s Disk Drives,” “I Am PLATO’s Channel Controllers.” Parrello himself contributed a regular column entitled “…and with a mighty crash.” “Every time there was a major outage,” he says, “I would go find out what caused it, and write an article about it the next day.” Outages on PLATO during the News Report era were about as common as the appearance of the notorious “Fail Whale” on Twitter decades later. David Woolley contributed exhaustive movie listings. “Every week,” says Woolley, “I put together a list of all the movies showing on campus and in theaters around town, along with show times and often a one- or two-line mini-review, if I had seen the movie. This wasn’t too hard to do in a town the size of Champaign-Urbana—I think I spent maybe an hour or two a week on it.” Parrello remembers Woolley’s movie listings as being a great value, for they not only included listings that the local paper offered, but also one-dollar movie nights at on-campus locations. Readers loved Woolley’s listings but wanted reviews as well. Woolley found that hard because he hadn’t seen most of the films. Another user contributed reviews of Star Trek reruns and also detailed listings of when they were broadcast and on what TV channel. (This being an era before TiVos and DVR, some UI students made a determined effort to set up their class schedules based on precisely when Star Trek reruns aired during the weekdays, so as to be sure they would never miss a show.)

  “Everything that a computer user needed,” says Parrello about News Report, “movies and Star Trek episodes were right there! I also remember John Eisenberg did a review of the first episode of Space: 1999 and we learned something important about the future: people talk without moving their faces.” The core premise of Space: 1999’s premiere episode involved the moon having become an enormous storage depot for the earth’s accumulated nuclear waste, which, unfortunately, would blow up with such force as to send the moon, and the hapless heroes at Moonbase Alpha, hurtling out of orbit into deep space…and onward to new and different adventures each week. Before the big explosion in the first episode, Martin Landau’s character at one point uttered, “We are sitting on the biggest bomb man ever made.” Eisenberg responded in his scathing review that Landau was “absolutely correct.”

  Not everything on News Report went over well with readers. “There was one disaster,” says Parrello, “which was called ‘Baseball Report,’ which reported baseball scores. I thought that it would be something that people would find interesting. But I got so many complaints about it, people hated it, said it was boring.” Things got so bad that readers began exchanging nasty pnotes with the reporter. “Eventually I had to pull the plug, which really annoyed the reporter who was doing it. But what could I do?” Years later, the audience reaction still baffled Parrello. “People really hated it. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because we were all geeks and it was about sports.”

  Editorials were a favorite outlet for Parrello antics. He had a general rule that editorials needed to be on topics so ridiculous that no one could possibly believe they were real. “That was my rule,” he says. One editorial advocated for getting rid of the earth’s ozone layer, “because it was just too damn fragile.” That spawned a series of replies, including one suggesting enclosing the earth in a dome and that they should hire R. Buckminster Fuller to design it. Another editorial, written when the gun control debate was raging in the national media, was based on a homicide study that had been done in Europe. “We came across a survey showing that 55 percent of murders committed by German women were done with frying pans. In the United States it was the telephone. But overseas it was the frying pan. So I did an article about how there was a deadly weapon available in stores and we needed frying pan control. And we did the whole thing, you know, registered communists got frying pans, and that shit generated a whole bunch of follow-on editorials.” Yet another time, Parrello says, “a system programmer jokingly complained in =pad= that they ought to install a cattle prod, so that when someone asked a really stupid question, that they could send a jolt of electricity through them. And so I came out with an editorial against that: Keep PLATO Safe! And that got a bunch of replies too, and there was talk about bringing me upstairs and hooking me up to the machine so that the problem would be illuminated to the satisfaction of most people.”

  At least once, Parrello caused a panic among the powers-that-be at CERL. It was 1975, the year that Senator William Proxmire began issuing his notorious Golden Fleece Awards to identify government programs that Proxmire felt were fraudulent, self-serving, and wasteful. His very first award went to the National Science Foundation, the organization that had funded PLATO. In 1975, Richard Atkinson, who had once worked on CAI research with Patrick Suppes at Stanford University, had been appointed by President Ford to become NSF’s new deputy director, and it was onto his lap that Proxmire’s hot potato landed. “When he [Proxmire] delved into the social sciences,” Atkinson says, “he found an NSF-supported grant dealing with an experimental analysis of love from a social/psychological perspective, and another grant concerned with a theory of love. At that time the National Enquirer was paying a $500 bounty to freelance reporters who came up with a story of this sort, and many writers would just scan the titles of research projects supported by NSF. The Chicago Tribune had a field day with the theory-of-love grant, and as if this weren’t bad enough, they found a project titled ‘A Theory of Necking Behavior.’ We tried in vain to find this grant on NSF’s list of social science projects. Days later we finally unearthed it among the engineering projects—the necking referred to was of a metal, not a human, variety. Several of the faculty grantees who were recipients of the Golden Fleece wore it proudly as a badge of merit and made the most of their notoriety on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. This was serious business for NSF, however, because it played havoc with the foundation’s public image and relations with Congress.” Says Parrello, “Proxmire was coming down hard on the National Science Foundation. He was trying to force a complete audit of all the projects by the National Science Foundation, some of which he said were obviously ridiculous. He wanted people to understand how important this was. I said [on News Report] that among the things supported by the National Science Foundation is a system called PLATO, which must be some sort of computer simulation of a Greek philosopher.” Some of the CERL staffers who read News Report were aghast. “People thought that Proxmire was specifically targeting PLATO, and that caused a storm, and I had to put in a retraction immediately, and I’ll always remember that as the importance of double-checking your pronouns, to make sure there’s no doubt about which refers to what. I wanted to drive it home but I didn’t want to cause a panic.”

  Groupe wrote a regular column for News Report called “Groupe’s Gripe.” “A general bitch column,” he says. “Bruc
e always told me he hated the column, but couldn’t get rid of it because it always got the highest readership of the paper.” Groupe began investigating a student group called Students for Equal Access to Quality Education (SEAQE). His first SEAQE exposé appeared in a “Groupe’s Gripe” in October 1975. Titled “SEAQE and Ye Shall Find,” it wasted no time to accuse the group of campus violations:

  SEAQE…is currently engaged in canvassing dorms to solicit people to help with their fight against a proposed tuition hike. From what I am told, much of this canvassing is being done without a permit and is therefore in violation of University housing regulations.

  One of SEAQE’s members stopped by my room to explain why he felt that we shouldn’t have to pay for our education. When he discovered that I am not opposed to a tuition hike to keep the University going, he walked out and said, “It must be nice to have money.” But that’s what the tuition hike is all about. It would be nice if the University had money.

  Groupe’s article generated numerous online comments, some that objected to the planned tuition hike, and some that thought it reasonable. Those assailing the hike complained that those who didn’t mind it probably had their tuition paid by “unnamed sources” such as parents. Several commenters, including Dave Woolley, countered that argument, saying they were paying their own way to attend the university and despite the planned hike, felt the education received was still worth every penny—and more.

  In another “Gripe” column, Groupe went even further, declaring that he had discovered that SEAQE “was created by, and is a sister organization to, the Revolutionary Students Brigade, a Marxist organization whose goal is to overthrow ‘rich and fat corporate heads’ whose ‘fortunes are based on the profit ripped out of the sweat and labor of the millions of working people.’ ” In December, another “Gripe” appeared, documenting how Groupe and Parrello had attended a supposedly open meeting of the Revolutionary Students Brigade in the Illini Union. “Here we learned that the RSB is linking up with the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) before the year’s end….They admitted that the formation of SEAQE was not only for the purpose they tell prospective members of SEAQE. They admitted that one of the main reasons for SEAQE’s existence is to get students involved in the ‘struggle of the masses’ and in so doing, get students to go along with the RSB/RCP.” Groupe dug deeper. “I found a copy of an official SEAQE membership list, which I was repeatedly told didn’t exist, which lists the names and addresses of the active members. Just for fun I checked the Student/Staff directory to see what their majors were.” What he found instead was that several of the members were not university students at all. Groupe’s continued coverage of the student communists annoyed their organization enough that, Parrello says, “he was scared for his life for a while.”

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  Unlike today, where blogs and online newspaper sites offer vast searchable archives, given the limits of disk space on PLATO, articles and letters had to expire after a short period of time, to make room for new material. (Unfortunate for historians: this meant the only way to read News Report archives years later was by viewing any surviving printouts; in Parrello’s case, those printouts were lost long ago in a flooded basement. Nothing is known to have survived.) Parrello went a step further, in fact, by expiring “reporter” status on a user if he or she didn’t submit new material within two weeks of the last submission (the policy instituted as a reaction to the initial onslaught of wannabe reporters who eagerly signed up when the “reporter” feature first was released, but never turned anything in, or were not reliable or perceived as being serious). One consequence of Parrello’s design was that during UI’s long Christmas break, the PLATO community discovered that News Report had purged everything: articles, columns, letters, as well as the reporters. The program did what it had been told to do, in order to make room for new content. It quietly nuked things, day after day, while everyone was home enjoying the holidays—away from PLATO terminals—until by the end of three weeks, News Report was an empty digital wasteland. The PLATO system kept running, delivering instruction to schools and institutions and other paying clients, but News Report ran dry and would have to be restarted when the next semester began.

  —

  One day, Mike Huben, a student using one of the rare PLATO terminals out at Cornell University, inspected the source code to News Report and found a vulnerability, which he then exploited. “Bruce was very proud of his coding,” says Huben, “and left the inspect code off so that people could see the implementation.” Huben used what was known to some as the “jumpout trick.” He wrote a program that used the TUTOR -jumpout- command to jump from his own program over to a specific line of code inside News Report. He knew exactly where to jump to because Parrello had left the code inspectable to everyone. From there he was able to press SHIFT-DATA, causing News Report to return him to his own program. Once back in his own program, he changed the values of what in TUTOR were called “student variables,” then jumped right back to News Report, but this time used TUTOR command -inhibit from-, which concealed to the target lesson the name of the originating lesson out from which the user had just “jumped.” That caused News Report to think the user was returning from News Report itself, in effect causing it to drop its guard and retain the secretly changed values of the “student variables.” At that point, Huben essentially “owned” the program memory that News Report relied on to perform its tasks. “I was able to pretend to be anybody I wanted,” says Huben, giving him any access he desired.

  Not surprisingly, once in, there was one important thing to do.

  “The first thing I did was to lock out Bruce,” says Huben. Parrello thought he’d been derfed, or that someone had stolen his password, so he asked a systems programmer to help him get back into News Report so he could set things right. A day or two later, Huben was at it again with another -jumpout- exploit. This time he published an article in News Report, written by a fictional user named “patty hearst” of group “sla,” that declared that the Symbionese Liberation Army had liberated the Red Sweater News Service, and, says Huben, were “threatening to destroy the Orange Fanta bottling plant” unless Bruce met their demands. Then he locked Parrello out again. Parrello was furious, and declared publicly that somebody had broken system security. “It didn’t occur to him that it could be his own fault,” Huben says, not even bothering to disguise his glee at successfully fooling none other than the famous Red Sweater, expert programmer, whose code was visible for all to see. What’s worse, Huben had fooled him from a pesky Cornell University PLATO terminal eight hundred miles away. “After a few hours of laughing,” Huben says, he TERM-talked Parrello and confessed. Laughs all around, and life went on.

  Parrello was sometimes able to turn the tables and fool a would-be prankster. His prank was subtle and could easily be overlooked at first glance. Larry White, a student and CERL programmer who’d worked on Dogfight, recalls going into News Report every day to see what new and interesting articles were posted. One day, Red Sweater did something particularly noteworthy—something that would be hard to do on today’s Web, but was a piece of cake on PLATO. He wrote an article about Rick Blomme, how he was good at the Big Board games, and how his game nickname was “Red Baron.” “In the middle of this article,” says White, “it mentioned that one of his main opponents that he really admired fighting against was ‘white’ of ‘p.’ ” That was Larry White’s signon. At the time, White had no reason not to believe that Blomme had actually been quoted as saying that, and that Red Sweater had duly noted that in his interview with Blomme and that he had then faithfully conveyed that fact to readers of the article. “I thought,” says White, “that Red Sweater had written in ‘white’ of ‘p’ in the article. There was no indication to the reader of the article that anybody else saw anything different than ‘white’ of ‘p.’ And in fact I had played against Rick Blomme many, many times, Rick had beaten me many times, I had beaten him many times.” White was proud of Blomme’s public acknowl
edgment, particularly because Blomme was known to be a formidable opponent. The reality, as White would soon discover after having been duly duped by Red Sweater, was that whoever read the Blomme article saw their own signon mentioned as being the opponent most feared by Blomme.

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  News Report was enough of an achievement for Red Sweater to earn a seat in the PLATO hall of fame, but for a lot of the PLATO community, he’s even more well known for something completely different: animations and emoticons. When we think of emoticons today, we think of primitive “smiley” pictures typed by lining up some punctuation points, like :-). Often they require tilting your head. These kinds of emoticons had not and would not come into use on the ARPANET for nearly another ten years, but on PLATO they had already been established as a new art form and were in widespread use. And, as was PLATO’s wont, they looked completely different from the more primitive emoticons people use today. The only thing that visually comes close today are the Japanese emoji icons, now popular worldwide in chat applications and on Twitter.

  To fully appreciate PLATO-style emoticons and the sorts of animation techniques that Red Sweater made famous, it is first necessary to step back and revisit the supremely odd architecture of the PLATO system. PLATO could be a Darwinian case study: here was a computer environment, a bizarre and impossibly improbable ecosystem, unlike any other in the world, developing entirely off on its own and left, literally, to its own devices, in the sense that nothing, including machines networked through the ARPANET, could connect to it. Within the confines of this curious environment, one that was created for educational purposes, all sorts of strange and wonderful and decidedly noneducational “creatures” quickly came to life and thrived: notesfiles, pnotes, TERM-talk, Talkomatic, multiuser games, News Report, etc. But there were also other strange “creatures” as well, emergent phenomena that could only exist because of PLATO’s unusual system architecture. For example, PLATO’s text emoticons.