by Brian Dear
Hyperlinks didn’t exist on PLATO, and while eerily similar to online newspapers and blogs, News Report did not offer a way for a user to click on a word, or an image, and be transported to another page or even another site. But the next best thing was to employ TUTOR’s -jumpout- command, which enabled one PLATO lesson to transport its user to another lesson. The -jumpout- command brought modularity to News Report. Parrello saw this as a way of extending News Report without having to keep building a bigger program, which would mean more disk space. Instead, he’d make the disk space problem someone else’s problem. With -jumpout- he could announce in News Report the availability of something much larger than an article or column: he could announce the availability of an epic reading experience. One called The Great Guano Gap, if not the first, was one of the very earliest examples of interactive fiction or “digital storytelling” done on a computer.
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Bill Roper had enrolled as a freshman as a chemistry major at Southern Illinois University in the fall of 1973. He took a FORTRAN course the next year, and continued visiting the computer center after that to tinker around with the machines. “I was writing Conway’s Game of Life [an early computer game that mimics cells growing into little life-forms over many iterations] and somebody mentioned, ‘Hey, have you seen the computer over in the library that can play games?’ I said, ‘No, that sounds interesting,’ and so I headed out over there and found the PLATO computer. And before too long, got an author signon, because it turned out that writing programs on it was much more interesting than necessarily playing the games.”
For the next three years, Roper would hang out on the PLATO terminal he’d found in the SIU library. “We had one whole terminal, and you could schedule an hour a day on it if you had an author signon, and of course everyone would try to scavenge the time that nobody was using.” The one PLATO terminal on the entire SIU campus was available until midnight, at which time the library was shut down and students would have to leave. This was the same terminal that would soon be commandeered late into the night by the SIU students Ray Wood and Gary Whisenhunt, creating the Dnd game.
Compared to the situation at most PLATO sites at the University of Illinois campus, where disk space and signons were difficult to get and control of system resources was carefully watched, SIU was laid-back. “The guy who was originally the site administrator wasn’t paying much attention, and we actually ended up with the inmates running the asylum,” says Roper.
Roper became a fan of News Report and eventually submitted his Guano Gap story to Red Sweater. “When I was running the Red Sweater News Service,” Parrello says, “people were always submitting stuff for publication. I hated turning people down flat, so I would generally tell them why I didn’t want to use the material and what could be done to fix it. It was more polite than a rejection slip, but it had exactly the same effect, except once. A guy at Southern Illinois University and his friends had come up with a series of letters between two fictitious nations which started with a general state of tension and ended with the two nations being buried in bird droppings. The intent was to make an antiwar statement in a humorous way. The guy who submitted it (his handle was Quetzal and of course that’s the only name I remember) had framed it with a Star Trek story in which Kirk and Spock briefly commented on the letters as they read them. It was intensely boring, so I did what I always do and gave the guy a bunch of suggestions: make the framing story bigger, relate it to the PLATO community instead of Star Trek, and so forth and so on. For the first (and last) time, somebody actually took my suggestions. The new framing story involved the antics of a godlike creature whose user ID was ‘supreme being’ of ‘p.’ ”
Roper duly reworked the material, including the notes between the two countries, text originally written back in high school by him and some friends. He removed the Star Trek motif and made PLATO and the University of Illinois the new setting. Parrello provided editorial help as Roper went along. “Writing at a distance,” Roper says, “I would get things occasionally wrong about the U of I. He had suggestions on that.”
Parrello also provided Roper with an engine to simulate a TERM-talk. Guano Gap was an intensely interactive work of fiction, a science-fiction Twilight Zone–style production that could only exist on the computer. Much of the story was told by the reader watching a TERM-talk session between the narrator and various PLATO users, Red Sweater among them, but also “supreme being” of “p.” Parrello’s TERM-talk simulator code was uncannily realistic: characters would appear on-screen at random speeds, making it appear that they were really being typed by a person. (However, when “supreme being” of “p” was talking, the entire line of text would appear in an instant.)
Guano Gap started with this introduction: “Early one morning, the first page of text in the guanogap lesson began, I, Bill Roper, occasionally known as the Quetzal, walked up to my local PLATO terminal and somewhat fumblingly signed on.” At that point a user pressed NEXT, and saw the screen erase and a simulated Author Mode appear. “Welcome Ypsilanti State University” was the satirical top-of-screen Author Mode message. The page indicated that there were unread personal notes. The narration continued: “Aha! Notes! I said as I hurried to read them.” The fictional Bill Roper then went to his first unread pnote:
From: chancellor bosnia On: 07/23/72 14.32.35
TO: Minister of Diplomacy, Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina
FROM: His Honor the Chancellor, Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina
Mr. Meshkernukelsniszerpblognufwazluzklawolski:
In recent years our nation’s trade status has suffered due to the fact that no nation in the whole goddam world knows we exist. Our position is further hampered by the fact that even if they knew they wouldn’t care.
This strange message continued in the next two pnotes:
In an effort to improve this status, we have attempted to open relations with many of the nations of the world: Armenia, Northern Ireland, West Pakistan, Portuguese Guam, and the United States of America. All of these contacts have proved unsuccessful; usually resulting in our ministers being denied access to the country due to illiteracy, or of our dispatches and official communiques being used to make paper airplanes or wrap garbage in.
In a more recent attempt, our nation gave diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Tibet. This means that there are now two nations in the world who have done so: Us and Tibet. However, we have not been able to find the Tibetan government to inform them. We have, however, made one unfortunate discovery: Tibet has nothing to trade that we do not have an enormous surplus of already. (Snow: 6 feet; Abominable Snowmen: None, more than enough) I therefore ask you the question;
WHAT THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO TRY NOW?
—From the Office of the Chancellor
“This is definitely bizarre, I thought, as I noticed this note had supposedly been written in 1972,” says Roper’s character. “I decided to take some positive action. It was time to call in Red Sweater.”
At this point, readers continue to watch a representation of Roper’s screen as if looking over his shoulder. The entire reading experience of Guano Gap is like a second level of monitor mode: we see what’s on narrator Roper’s screen as well as read his story along with him. We watch as Roper TERM-talks “parrello” of “uimatha,” telling him he has something bizarre to show him, then takes him into monitor mode, so that he can see Roper’s display as well. Roper jumps back to the first of the chancellor’s pnotes, but it’s not there. Instead, it’s a mundane one-liner email from a friend at SIU.
“So what?” the Parrello character types, in the simulated TERM-talk.
“But that’s not what it said,” Roper’s character types back. “It was a note from the chancellor of bosnia-herzegovina dated in 1972.”
“This is a lousy joke,” the Parrello character types. “Bye.” PLATO displays “end of talk.”
Frustrated, Roper’s character returns to the Author Mode, only to find that he has more unread pnotes
awaiting. He goes in and finds even stranger messages from the External Affairs Ministry of the Internal Di-Lama in Tibet, writing to the “Counslar” of Bosnia-Herzegovina. “Dear Counslar,” the message began in broken and misspelled English. “The Di-lama grateful accepts the gift you sent of 2 horses.” On it went, discussing potential diplomatic recognition between Tibet and Bosnia-Herzegovina, “but,” the message said, “we must know one thing, where are you.” Neither country’s envoy knew where in the world the other country was. Tibet offers to open up trade between the two countries, offering giant pandas, snowmen, lots of rocks, stranded mountain climbers, and their equipment.
Roper attempts to TERM-talk Parrello again, and once again, his efforts to show Parrello these strange pnotes fail: they had vanished. “If this is your idea of something funny,” Parrello types, “well this isn’t funny roper bye” and ends the talk.
More strange pnotes appear. There were only two explanations, Roper narrates. “Either someone was playing a hideous, complicated, and thoroughly impossible prank, or else, I was going mad. To be continued.”
Thus ended episode one of The Great Guano Gap. In episode two, Roper tells how friends hanging out in the PLATO room at SIU are amazed to see the chancellor’s pnotes on Roper’s screen. “What in the world is that?” Ray Wood asks. Roper is thrilled that someone else sees the message, convincing him he’s not going mad. Another friend, Gary Whisenhunt, sees the strange message too. But a third, Mike Capek, thinks the whole thing is a prank and he’s being set up by the others. Roper gets up and lets Capek sit down at the terminal. Capek signs on, attempts to condense his TUTOR lesson, they stare at the screen, and, instead of the normal system behavior, the screen says,
Call Your Instructor
Unable to condense lesson.
Author is a nonbeliever
at which point, so the story goes, the terminal’s built-in microfiche projector blinds them all in a brilliant flash of light. When they finally can see again, they are shocked to discover that Capek has vanished from his chair in front of the terminal. They soon discover he’s been somehow teleported into the PLATO system itself, and he soon appears as a tiny little figure on the screen, waving frantically and yelling, “LET ME OUT!” (Just a few years later, Bonnie MacBird, Alan Kay’s wife, would write the story for the Disney movie Tron, which told the tale of a video arcade owner, played by Jeff Bridges, who gets zapped by a beam of energy and transported into the electronic circuitry of a vast tyrannical computer that he desperately wishes to escape.)
Things go from strange to even stranger as Roper suddenly sees a message at the bottom of his screen, indicating that he is being monitored by “supreme being” of “p,” who, the system tells him, “also sees this display.” Trembling and not sure who this user is, he presses the TERM key and begins to type. He asks, “Are you Frankel?”
For a CERL user in 1975 this would no doubt have elicited what on social media today would be a cavalcade of knowing LOLs. Frankel, the youngest systems staffer, at the time only fifteen years old, could sometimes be overbearing. Guano Gap was poking fun at him.
At first Supreme Being thinks this is some sort of joke, but, now angry, causes Roper’s terminal to display all sorts of random noisy lines, which convinces Roper to show respect. The Supreme Being is not pleased that Roper plans to ignore any more Bosnia-Herzegovina messages, and indicates that Roper has been chosen to help save the world from a great danger.
Guano Gap appeared in serialized installments in late 1975. It represented perhaps the earliest example of a new genre of fiction: the interactive story told through software on a computer, navigated by the reader. (Around the same time, Priscilla Obertino was developing on PLATO the lesson The Glumph, an NSF-funded interactive multimedia story for elementary reading students, which also allowed children to touch underlined words to hear an audio clip of that word being spoken, and pick different outcomes of the story.) There was a meta-level to Guano Gap that made it particularly unusual: the story itself was one involving the PLATO computer, told through simulations of the very software and applications that the readers of the story were intimately familiar with. The result was a clever parody of the everyday experience PLATO users lived. It was something very new, taking storytelling in an entirely new, digital direction, where the only place to experience the story was online. The message required the medium.
—
Meanwhile, out at the University of Delaware (UD), which had by 1977 accumulated quite a few PLATO terminals, all of which were connected over expensive phone lines to CERL, a young undergrad named David Graper began writing notes about his experience with an interactive series of music lessons on PLATO called GUIDO. Anyone could sit down at one of the terminals in the PLATO classroom in the music building and use a special signon, “student” of group “udmusic,” to try out the GUIDO material. One menu item that that signon offered to users was access to a notesfile, =guidonotes=. One day, Graper chose that menu item, entered the notesfile, and just began typing a story. Initially the stories were about GUIDO. Often referring to the program as “she,” he concocted imaginary episodes of the strange effects GUIDO had on its users. Graper extended his subject areas to more general stories, which kept getting longer and longer, having nothing to do with GUIDO and certainly not appropriate for posting in =guidonotes=. His new stories centered around an umlaut-festooned alter ego with superpowers named Dr. Gräper, Master of Reality, who possessed a PhD in Humor.
Graper stories became a hit on the UD campus and to many users on the CERL PLATO system. One might walk into an otherwise quiet Delaware classroom full of terminals, all of them in use by students or staff reading Gräper stories, and hear snickers, chortles, and out-loud laughs amid occasional shushes by more serious users in the room. Invariably the laughs came from users reading the latest Gräper story. Word spread quickly at Delaware, Illinois, and even in Minneapolis, and a following grew. Fans would race to a terminal as soon as there was news of a new posting.
Graper would take snippets from his real-life college existence—boring classes in gigantic auditoriums, taking drugs and getting high, dealing with bad weather, snooty college girls, dumb frat jocks, dorks, losers, frustrating bureaucracies, corrupt teachers, and, worst of all, whiners—and craft them into humorous stories where his alter ego Dr. Gräper saved the world or sought revenge in the form of mischievous pranks on all his sources of real-world problems.
A taste of an early story: “Impossible Physics 201,” posted online in 1977:
“Alright,” the professor said to the massive clot of humanity gathered in the lecture hall, “let’s get under way.”
Thousands of notebooks opened to their first pages, and thousands of pens and pencils stood on the ready, preparing to copy down whatever the professor said.
“If you don’t know already, this is Impossible Physics 201, and I’m Adolf Hitler.”
“That’s impossible!” a young man from the crowd shouted.
“Precisely!” the professor returned. “Physically impossible!”
The students murmured with appreciation at this first taste of impossible physics.
“Alright, students, let’s try something else. How about this?”
The professor climbed on top of the central lab table and jumped off without falling. Standing in mid-air, he asked the class to explain what he was doing.
“You’re…you’re standing in midair!” an overly made-up female in the front row said.
“True,” the professor said, “and what else?”
“You’re denying the law of gravity!” shouted an exchange student from Nigeria who got a special grant from the people at Coca-Cola just to study under this professor.
“Right,” the professor stated, beginning to pace back and forth in mid-air in front of the lab table. He walked back onto the lab table and then slowly stepped back onto the ground.
“What I just did can easily be explained by this equation,” the professor said, pulling down a
screen with an incredibly complex, all-in-tiny-print formula on it. “Study it hard, you’re going to have a quiz on it in thirty seconds that figures for 97% of your grade!”
“That’s unfair!” a girl in the front row objected.
“Hardly, Miss Mayfair,” the professor grunted, pleased at Ms. Mayfair’s look of dismay at his knowing her name. “It’s impossible!”
Miss Mayfair’s face turned red with embarrassment.
“Don’t worry, Miss Mayfair. The only punishment for wrong answers in this class is disfiguration.” To this Miss Mayfair laughed quietly and returned to her former composure.
“Alright, class, now for the quiz. Everyone take out a blank sheet of paper.”
Thousands of sheets of paper ripped out simultaneously.
“Lay them on your desks, and prepare yourself for question one.”
The classroom silenced.
“Alright, that’ll be it,” the professor said.
The students looked at each other in dismay.
“Your quizzes have been scored, graded, registered, modulated and transmitted to the unknown civilizations of the universe.”
Suddenly, a rush of sound ran through the lecture hall. The students turned over their papers to find quizzes, written in their own handwriting, suddenly graded and scored.
“I didn’t write this!”
“But it’s your handwriting!” the professor retorted. “Class is over. I’ll see you all yesterday.”
The students again murmured among themselves about the sanity of their teacher, and filed out of the lecture hall. It was snowing. When they had come in, it had been summer, with 90 degrees in the shade.
David J. Graper was born in Grand Island, New York, an island in the Niagara River between the United States and Canada, a few minutes from Niagara Falls. He recalls that his science teacher in school once told his class that Grand Island would eventually float down the river and go over the Falls. “The teacher, perhaps a frustrated artist,” says Graper, “put in the extra effort to actually paint his own ‘artist’s conception’ of this future with our island poised halfway over the Falls and proudly showed it to our second-grade class, pointing out the street our school was on as a reference point….His assurance that this future would happen several million years in the future didn’t help much, since I was pretty sure I’d still be alive then and still going to that elementary school and like many of my chess club friends I spent the rest of my time eating in the part of the cafeteria that was furthest from the ‘doomed’ end of our school building.”
