by Brian Dear
Graper’s father worked as a chemical engineer and computer expert for DuPont in Delaware, where the family moved in 1970. Graper attended Newark High School, where he became friends with classmate Dan Tripp in the school’s television studio, which had received funding from the local public TV station. “I began as the weatherman for the intra-building morning television program, which was the standard lineup of high school crap—two people behind a counter reading math club meeting announcements, dreary recitations of the girls’ field hockey scores, etc. The position of weatherman was the lowest of the three ‘talent’ positions available (the other two being ‘anchor’ and ‘sportscaster’) and was by far the most stupid position, since talking about the weather outside a building to people inside the building who could look out a window to see it for themselves seemed surreal. Hence the job was perfect for me.”
Graper eventually enrolled at UD, also in Newark, and one day came across PLATO by accident. “I was using a piano in the music building and saw a small dark room with those glowing orange touch screens inside. I walked in and started playing with the system, since no one objected, and then I saw someone writing a note to a notesfile and that was it. I had discovered a new way to waste time, which is my true raison d’être.”
He also found the GUIDO lessons, deeming them “excellent.” “The software was truly masterful, I thought (and still believe), because it was a perfect application of technology to a specific educational task….It took a truly dreadful, repetitive learning task (learning music intervals) and automated it. I never had to take a class requiring it but began playing with it because of the videogame aspect of it, later because I found I was able to use the skills it taught in actually hearing and writing down chords.”
GUIDO led him to the =guidonotes= notesfile, set up for the purpose of enabling students to ask questions and post comments about the GUIDO lessons. Until Graper arrived, that is. Here was a notesfile, it seemed open to students, he was a student, so he sat down and he wrote notes. Initially, his notes were GUIDO related, but were not quite what the music faculty and staff had in mind. Fortunately, Bill Lynch, GUIDO’s programmer and director of the notesfile, found Graper’s stories amusing. They met and became friends.
Graper’s stories gave him an outlet for his frustrations at what he viewed as the absurdity of university life, consumer life, television, marketing, urban congestion, dumb people, and a long litany of other complaints. What he had not expected was the reaction to his stories, the following of fans that grew, and the demand, unceasing, incessant, for more. In time, Graper was becoming such a weight on the otherwise quaint little =guidonotes= notesfile that Lynch decided to create a notesfile just for Graper. It was called =grapenotes=. Now Graper had a place all of his own to write as much as he wished. So he did.
For example, in 1979, Graper got a job at the UDPLATO project, whose headquarters were in an old two-story house everyone called “The PLATO Palace.” He turned the job interview with Jim Wilson and Bonnie Seiler (she had come to Delaware after working in the elementary math project at CERL several years before) into a story:
Dear Friend:
I got interviewed for a job today at the PLATO palace, and like, I really think I screwed it up. Yeah. You’ve all got jobs, man, but it’s because you always went to bed on time when you were kids and always handed in your homework neatly, with your names and the dates precisely printed on the top left hand corner.
As for me, my chances don’t look too good. Let me replay the conversation for you:
[Bonnie Seiler and Jim Wilson come into the room where Dr. Gräper lies prostrate over a couch.]
Bonnie: Well, hello!
Dr. G: Don’t you know about knocking?
Jim W: Oh, sorry!
Dr. G: Well? (Sits up)
Jim W: Well what?
Dr. G: When do I start getting paid?
Bonnie: Well, ah…first we’d like to find out exactly you’d like to do.
Jim W: Yeah. What are you taking in college now?
Dr. G: What business is it of yours!?! You’re as bad as my old man!
Bonnie: Well, are you majoring in computer science?
Dr. G: Who do you take me for? Some calculator toting meatbrain? I’m taking introductory.
Jim W: Introductory what?
Dr. G: Introductory everything! Intro to Sociology, Intro to Basic Psych, Intro to introduction….I’ve been taking intro courses since I was a freshman.
Jim W: So in actuality you are majoring in (giggles) introduction? An introduction major?
Dr. G: You could say that.
Bonnie: Well, ah, what would you like to program in?
Dr. G: I don’t know. You tell me [heaving leg over nearby chair].
Jim W: Are there any subjects that you think could use further development? Any subjects not covered now by PLATO?
Dr. G: Well, I do have some ideas
Bonnie: [Getting out pen and paper] Shoot.
Dr. G: I think I should program in some lessons about rock music lyrics and maybe some dirty poetry.
Jim W: Well…
Dr. G: Just text blocks, you know?
Bonnie: [Putting away pen and paper] Well, ah, we’ll call you…
Dr. G: When are my hours? I want them 6–7 on Wednesdays on months that begin with a “J.”
Jim W: Well, we’ll have to work that out. We’ll call you.
Dr. G: Look, what’s the bottom line? What position do I take?
Jim W: What position would you like?
Dr. G: That one. [Points to position name in PLATO brochure]
Bonnie: Well, Fred Hofstetter already has that position…
Dr. G: [Pounding table] Damn!
Jim W: Look, how about we call you later…
…and so it went.
Your Friend,
Dr. Gräper
No doubt the real-life interview went better, as Graper was hired. One of his eventual tasks was to empty out the “uddata” dataset file containing massive amounts of student data whenever it got full. Disk space was always scarce, and there was only so much of it. As a courtesy, he would post a note in =staffnotes= warning everyone that he would be reinitializing the file very soon, and if someone needed some data from it, get it out quick. The UDPLATO staff would discover that, what started out as routine, succinct, professional courtesy reminders, complete with the exact time and date that the data would be reinitialized, did not last long. Graper couldn’t resist, and the routine reminders rapidly evolved (or devolved) into progressively longer, more elaborate stories, turning =staffnotes= into another outlet for his creative mind. A sample:
staffnotes / unidel 7/3/79 5:23 pm graper / udps / unidel
Dear Friends:
“=uddata= is reinitialized,” he said. The words echoed emptily in the abandoned music building room. He looked down at his lunchbox. In it were five hundred scraps of paper, all saying “Remember to reinitialize =uddata=!” He wrote himself a lot of reminders. He checked his watch. Written all over his arm and hand in ball-point ink was “Remember =uddata=!”
It was 3:26. P.M.
Now it was time for =uddata= to fill again.
THE END
Your Friend,
David Gräper
—
staffnotes/unidel 7/17/79 10:03 am graper/udps/unidel
Dear Friends:
Whoa Nellie, I just took a few winks here at the switch and =uddata= is practically full! It’s come rumblin’ down the track full’a data, and if any of it’s yours, get it out by 9:38 a.m. tomorrow cause I’m reinitializing it then and =uddata= pulls out again, ready for another load.
And at 9:39 tomorrow, when you’re wiping the sleep from your eyes and you hear that lonesome whistle, don’t come whining down here to the digital depot because, hell, the schedule’s right there on the wall, can’t you read it?
hell, gave you enough warning.
Your Friend,
Dave Gräper
Stationmaster
<
br /> —
staffnotes/unidel 8/10/79 5:34 pm graper/udps/unidel
Dear Friends:
[Sound of gooey piano/orchestral music]
…Nature always provides the best way of doing things. Natural goodness comes only from the earth itself, and the most enjoyable life is the most natural way of being…
[Picture of people programming on terminals in the woods]
But sometimes, irregularity sets in. =uddata= gets filled up, and nature needs a little help.
[Programmers look at each other with concerned expressions]
That’s why =uddata= is going to be reinitialized Monday, August 13 at 7 p.m. If there’s anything in there you need, please get it out before then.
Reinitializing. It’s only natural.
Your Friend, graper/udps
One time he reverted back to a simple, brief, professional note: “=uddata= will be reinitialized tomorrow at 12 noon,” signing it, “Your Friend, Dave Gräper.” Fellow staffers were nonplussed. “Just like that?” wrote Jessica Weissman. Other users begged for a real Gräper story. That night, Graper delivered.
staffnotes/unidel 9/12/79 10:00 pm graper/udps/unidel
[40,000 feet above Stuttgart, Germany]
[Flak bursting all around, plane rocks violently]
[Scene from inside cockpit]
Navigator: Captain Gräper! We’ve got to dump it now and get out of here!!
Captain: (Face illuminated by near miss) No way, buddy! We drop our load when I give the word!!
[Big explosion]
Captain: Damn! There goes engine three!
Navigator: We’re only on two engines!! We’ve got to dump it now!!
Captain: I give the orders around here, mister!! We wait ’til the dataset is nearly filled, then drop it!
[Light on instrument panel lights up]
Captain: Alright! 54 out of 55 blocks filled! Reinitialize!
[Bomb bays open and tons of data fall to earth]
Captain: (Screaming triumphantly) Eat data, Adolf!!
[Plane lurches upward with weight gone, increases speed]
Navigator: (Sweating) Sorry sir, I guess I was…scared.
Captain: (Grinning) Only a fool wouldn’t have been, son.
The Delaware use of CERL PLATO grew to the point that it was too expensive to continue having dozens of terminals dialed long-distance to Illinois, so the university bought its own CYBER system from Control Data. This had an interesting effect on Graper’s legend. At Illinois, since most PLATO people were on campus, eventually a PLATO person would bump into the creator of this game, or that famous lesson, or some other mark of distinction. You were known. There was a real-world aspect to most CERL users. But the Delaware users, like users at any remote site connected to CERL’s system, were less real to the CERL community because they were not people you were going to bump into. Likewise, CERL and Illinois were mythical, distant places to most Delaware users. This disconnect became all the more noticeable when all of Delaware left CERL and their terminals were one day switched to the university’s own brand-new PLATO system, in 1978.
CERL users were fans of Graper, but now he was even more a mysterious entity who supposedly lived in Delaware. Some Illinois people had a gnawing doubt that Graper was a real person at all. Many believed he was actually a persona created by Bill Lynch, the name they saw so frequently as the person who actually posted the stories in the =grapenotes= notesfile (Graper would sometimes be busy, and hand Lynch a story he’d typed at home, asking Lynch to transcribe it into =grapenotes=, which had become a sort of “archive” for all things Graper). It’s a telling hint at how early things still were, that an online persona in the late 1970s still needed to be physically present on campus to be taken for real, or at least, known to exist at some nearby location—somebody had to have testified to having seen this Graper person in the flesh. The Red Sweater, who had by the time Graper was an online celebrity left CERL to pursue graduate school elsewhere, was a legend around CERL now, but he was real, he was someone who for years could be seen sitting at a terminal in the foreign language building or at some other campus site, wearing his red sweater, and doing his thing online. He was long gone from PLATO by the time Graper arrived on the scene, but there were still plenty of people who remembered Bruce Parrello and so they had no trouble believing in the Red Sweater. Dr. Gräper, on the other hand, was out east somewhere—supposedly—in some landmass near the Atlantic Ocean, an incomprehensible distance away. CERL users outside Delaware never met him or saw him in person. Even decades later, they would still carry doubts that David Graper ever existed.
20
Climbing the Ziggurat
Andrew Shapira was determined to be the best. He approached Empire the way top athletes approach the Olympics. His desire to be number one even extended beyond Empire to less glamorous pursuits like typing. Typing lessons and contests (sometimes it was hard to tell the difference) were all the rage on PLATO. Like the Big Board game craze, for a while it seemed that every kid who’d snagged an author signon and some lesson space had to write a typing game. A typical design was as follows: Here is a paragraph of text. Type it without error, as quickly as possible. Here’s another paragraph to type. Keep going as long as possible, and eventually you’ll get a score. If your score is good enough, you’ll be inserted into the game’s hall of fame, the list containing the names and words-per-minute scores of the most accurate and fastest typists.
People did crazy things to get to the top of these lists. Cheating was not out of the question. Though even a cheater ran up against an absolute speed limit thanks to the relatively slow speed of the connection going from the keyboard, through the terminal, over the phone line, and back to the CYBER mainframe.
Shapira was in junior high when he started hanging out in the foreign language building’s basement room with its vast sea of PLATO terminals. He’d found a typing test inside some utility program, and the typing test included a little racetrack game. “I guess I sort of got into it,” he says. “The other guys typed pretty fast and I sort of wanted to get going, so I did.” For the next six months he worked “really intensely on getting to be a good typist.” Even when he wasn’t at a terminal, when he was in class, he would be thinking about typing. “I would think about words that I would see and I would just type them mentally, think of what my fingers would do to type the things I saw. House, lights, light bulbs, things like that. And then, a few months later, I was typing faster than anyone.” His reputation was earned and solid and unbeatable. He did 150 words per minute, some say 160, some say even more. All you had to do was chat online with Andrew in TERM-talk or Talkomatic to witness his freakish speed. “Fast would be putting it mildly,” recalls Josh Paley, then another kid who hung around PLATO. “It was like looking at a human linefeed almost, I mean honest to God, you’d see a line full of characters, and then another line full of characters….It was just something, I mean absolutely unbelievable….The way he held the keyboard, his hands would come in from the side, so if you think about normal touch typing, where they tell you to put your thumbs on the space bar, and your fingers supposed to be resting on the F and the J or something like that, that wasn’t how he did it.” Ergonomics be damned, if he had to bend himself into a crab position, holding his elbows out, his hands coming in from the sides of the keyboard, so be it. “It was strange to watch but it was unbelievable,” says Paley.
Being fast in typing lessons was one thing. Even climbing to the top of the hall of fame to gain recognition as the fastest typist on PLATO got you only so far. Pressing keys fast—pressing the right keys accurately—in games like Empire was a different matter. That might get you recognition in other ways. One Empire player, whom we’ll call Mitch, says he, Andrew, and other friends “all had on speed typing drills that we wrote, just to get our Empire skills in order.” A friend and game rival, and fierce Empire player in his own right, Brian Blackmore, even decades later held Andrew in awe for his typing brilliance. “That
,” says Mitch, “is because Blackmore is the second fastest human at a keyboard talking about the first.” Blackmore, speaking in the late 1990s, said that if someone threw a PLATO terminal in front of him, he would dive back into Empire and climb right back up to number one in fifteen minutes, loving every minute of it. “And Andrew would hear about it, show up, and toast him,” says Mitch.
Andrew was to Empire in the same way Donald Bitzer was to PLATO. Their reputations unshakable, set in stone. Andrew to the game, Bitzer to the system. Andrew’s powers at Empire were superhuman, and extended beyond mere typing skills. He had a strategic and tactical sense, an innate understanding of timing, that gave him precious extra seconds to maneuver, flank, jump over, or otherwise surprise one or more opponents. Says Mitch,
Being a fast typist was no single guarantee! Newbies would arrive monthly…to try to take on the regulars. They would be carted off hours later in body bags. You had to be fast—but quickness alone was not enough, and there was an element of Zen magic to fighting. You had to know your opponent, study their moves, and play against their strength with your strength, or cover your weakness.
Andrew had no weakness. He was like Michael Jordan at this game. I have never seen such concentration in an individual, fingers flying across the screen yet conversely making hardly any sound. Sometimes he would take the keyboard and use it sideways, or upside down…just to prove he could still get a kill. Andrew could take people on one on five and win—good opponents!
