by Brian Dear
To the new arrivals, the pilgrims flowing into PLATO every day, your group was your tribe. Your group told a story. Some groups announced that you were a part of the CERL staff, like “o,” “pso,” “p,” and the top group, “s.” Group “s” contained the systems staff, the programmers and software engineers responsible for PLATO’s operating system, TUTOR language, programming editors, applications like TERM-talk, notesfiles, and TERM-consult, and other tools. “S” people like Paul Tenczar, Bruce Sherwood, Dave Andersen, and Bob Rader had unlimited privileges. “P” people, like David Frankel, Dave Woolley, and Brand Fortner, were the junior systems programmers (some of whom put up a sign in their office at CERL stating “Junior Systems Programmed While You Wait”). “During that whole period,” says Fortner, “I figured that I would have died and gone to heaven to get a ‘p’ signon, and the epitome of everything would be to get an ‘s’ signon. But, you know, getting that ‘p’ signon, I figured we ruled the universe.”
Having system privileges gave one power. Fortner admits that he loved the power the “p” signon gave him. One time he tried to impress a girl with the PLATO power he had. “We were really big on that power,” he says, “and I said, ‘I can execute a systems command’ and she’s like, ‘Oh, well, what can you do with that?’ And I said, ‘I can read files with my systems command.’ Because at that time, you know, a normal program couldn’t read and write files. And so, I added, I wrote a little five-line systems program that read a file, but I forgot to put in a couple of steps, and this is in the middle of prime time with thousands of students running, and I crashed the computer trying to show this girl how smart I was and I had to rush over to the computer room and try to explain things. I think they were unhappy.”
Dave Woolley, who at seventeen had been hired by CERL right out of Uni High, was very much aware of the high perch on the Ziggurat that his “p” signon afforded him. “That hierarchy was very present,” he says. “I mean, what can I say, I enjoyed it, because I was in this position of privilege.”
Some users saw power turning into power trips. “In the old days,” says Brendan McGinty, “it was a real power trip to have a group. And to have a signon. People would delete your signon, and it would be a big thing. If you cussed in a notesfile or something—I remember getting paged by David Frankel, ‘frankel’ of group ‘p’…he was typing so fast, you’ll never use this system again! blah blah blah, and it was like, end of talk. And I was booted off the system within about five seconds, I tried to sign back on, and it said that signon doesn’t even exist. I’m sure it was such a power trip to these people, to have such control.”
“He [Frankel] was a kid and he really, really rubbed people the wrong way,” says Ray Ozzie, who at the time was another UI undergraduate spending most of his time on PLATO, but would later become a very successful serial tech entrepreneur. “He had a very big in with Bitzer, if you want to say that everybody had a mentor, Bitzer was his mentor, and Frankel walked around like he owned the place. I mean literally like he owned the place. He bossed around, he had that little shit attitude and he’d go round to Tenczar, to Rader. He’d go, hey Paul blah blah blah blah, hey Rick blah blah blah blah. He bossed everybody around, you know Paul and Rick and people would just like blow him off because he was just a kid, but he had an attitude like he owned the place, whereas everyone else had to in one way, shape, or form kind of always tread lightly because you knew you had privilege, in having your records, ‘o’ records or ‘s’ records or ‘p’ records. I mean I lost mine at one point, various people had theirs pulled, it was highly, highly, highly political. Except for Frankel and he knew it, and he had this relationship with Bitzer.”
Each of the junior systems programmers had a little play area, a system TUTOR lesson wherein they could test code out that they were experimenting with. Frankel would poke around these “p” staff lessons, “constantly looking for things you were doing,” says Ozzie, and occasionally ratting to Tenczar or Blomme: “Notice this….What do you think Ray’s doing here in the third unit of tm8sys or ozsys?…He was always there to be a little pain in the ass.”
Ozzie also remembers receiving pnotes from Frankel containing snippets of one’s code with little comments about the code, “just to let you know that he was in there, just to dig you a little bit more.”
Frankel’s gadfly behavior got to the point that one day some of the other programmers grabbed him by the ankles and dangled him over the rail at the top of the stairwell, ready to drop him. Luckily for his sake, they didn’t.
To the technical staff at CERL, your story preceded you. All the junior systems programmers “knew intuitively which path ‘got you in,’ ” says Ray Ozzie, “basically, who was your sponsor. There were the Blomme/Lee people like Larry White who came in via the bottom-up systems/research path. There were Tenczar or Sherwood people like me who came in more from the top-down TUTOR/lesson path. There were Golden or Rader people like [Al] Harkrader or [Ron] Klass who came in via the ops path. There were several Bitzer-sponsored people like Frankel. There were of course the brilliant ‘music’ people who all orbited around Sherwin.”
If you were climbing the technical PLATO Ziggurat, the rest of the people above you wanted to know your story. “As a newcomer,” Ozzie says, “you needed to earn respect and prove your credibility to the people who came in via a different path. The incumbents didn’t know you, and always wondered how the hell the newcomers got their credentials, and whether or not they deserved them.”
—
Bitzer held the perch at the topmost of the highest of the PLATO pyramids, but didn’t sit and gloat there—nor did he even use an “s” signon very often. No, Bitzer either was making a statement acknowledging that he was not a software guy (certainly not a systems programmer), or he was simply too cool to use an “s” and instead preferred the relatively rare and decidedly less powerful “m” signon used by hardware and maintenance technicians.
Bitzer saw in Frankel the same brilliance and energy he saw in Andy Hanson and Mike Walker from years earlier. For Bitzer it did not matter how young or old a potential star contributor was. If you had an idea, then start working on it. His encouragement was so complete and authentic it was infectious. You never knew who was the next Einstein, so encourage everyone to be the next Einstein and increase the odds that the next Einstein would reveal himself.
Case in point: Doug Green’s encounter with Bitzer. To Bitzer, Green was a nobody, just a PLATO enthusiast, a gamer, a game author. Bitzer was that elusive “father of PLATO” figure, usually out on the road doing demos and trying to find the next funding round. “I knew who he was,” says Green. “Of course I knew who he was. The only time I talked to him, he was the only person around, and he seemed to have a free minute, and I asked him a question.” Years later he’s no longer sure what newbie question he posed to Bitzer, but it might have been about natural language processing. Perhaps if CERL considered this or that approach? “And he said,” says Green, “ ‘That’s one of the questions that we’re working on around here.’ And I said, ‘Well, I thought…you know, maybe if this…’ and he said something to the effect of, ‘Hmm, well, maybe you’ll be the one to figure it out!’ Blew me away. Blew me away.” If that didn’t want to make you get cracking, coding away on tough problems that would help the PLATO cause, and climb the pyramid of glory in the process, nothing did.
—
The majority of PLATO people were located at the University of Illinois until the late 1970s, when the number not only off-campus but out of state and affiliated with other institutions grew. Until that happened, it was possible to bump into most members of the community face-to-face in Champaign-Urbana. In the 1970s sitcoms and films often made fun of the pickup line “What’s your sign?” PLATO people at a party would ask, “What’s your signon?” It was common to know of the names and history of nearly everyone at a party, but not recognize any of them until you knew what their PLATO signon was—that was the only frame of reference for most
PLATO users. One’s signon was listed there every day on the Users List. One’s signon was at the header of every message posted in a notesfile. That was your PLATO identity.
Meeting people in person for the first time could be a shock. “I will never forget this for as long as I live,” says Ray Ozzie. He began TERM-talking with another PLATO user who had always posted thoughtful notes in the notesfiles and had interesting things to say in chats. “All I knew about him,” says Ozzie, “besides the fact that he was an interesting guy, was that he typed really slowly.” They finally met face-to-face and Ozzie was floored. The gentleman he’d been communicating with, Gary Michael, who created a successful courseware-development start-up company in town called Duosoft, was handicapped and in fact had been typing with a mouth stick, one key at a time on the keyset. “It was such an eye-opener for me, at the time, such an eye-opener….Nowadays it’s easy to say nobody knows you’re a dog or nobody knows this or that, but talk about as complete a shocker to your prejudices or your pre-judgments or whatever—it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me….Something I carry with me…the fact that you’re dealing with somebody’s mind, not their body.”
As the number of recreational lessons and games and notesfiles proliferated throughout the 1970s, the lofty status of the systems staff began to diminish. In the early years of PLATO IV, the most famous PLATO users were the creators of the system itself. Having an “s” or “p” or even “pso” carried great clout at parties. But as time went on and the user community grew, and more and more people in the community began to distinguish themselves in different ways online, be it by creating an excellent lesson or instructional simulation, a popular game, or just running a popular notesfile, they began to gain fame and notoriety all their own. Oftentimes systems programmers at a party were no longer the coolest people around. Sure, you might have written the system code that displays the phrase “What term?” when you pressed the TERM key, but that no longer compared to identifying yourself as one of the authors of Empire or Avatar or any number of other games or recreational activities on the system. “People would think those guys had much more exciting jobs than us,” says Al Harkrader, “and they were certainly more exciting since most of the stuff that we did was pretty esoteric, but Empire and Avatar and all those things were very tangible to most people so they could say, ‘Well, you know, gee, I met Al Harkrader but I couldn’t figure out what the hell the guy did, but I met Chuck Miller, the guy who wrote Empire, and that was totally cool.’ ”
21
Coming of Age
Ted Nelson is a genius, a visionary, a maverick, and somewhat of a Cassandra in computerdom. Born in 1937, he coined the term “hypertext” in 1963 and spent years designing and promoting his dream for the world: an elaborate, two-way hypertext online network, which he named Xanadu. (The world ignored it, and we have the Web instead.) In addition to his Xanadu work he’s written numerous books, perhaps the most famous of which are a pair he self-published in 1974 in a single volume: Computer Lib and Dream Machines. To this day the twin books continue to be essential reading. Nelson understood the computer revolution before most people knew what computers were or what they meant for society, and even now nuggets of insight can be gleaned by leafing through their pages.
The books summarized both what Nelson felt the general public should know about computers (Computer Lib’s cover boldly declared, “You can and must understand computers NOW”) as well as his travels across the country to discover what was going on with computers at the time. From 1973 to 1976 he was, in his words, “a lecturer and media maker, [in] various departments and auspices” at UICC (the old Chicago Circle campus of the University of Illinois). Early on during this time he visited several companies and university laboratories, assembling his findings and opinions in the books’ makeshift, partly typed, partly handwritten, cut-and-paste pages with zest and urgency. It is fortuitous that Nelson was at a campus of the University of Illinois during this era, as it was inevitable that PLATO and he should find each other. Deep inside Dream Machines he devoted several remarkable pages to his visits to the CERL lab and to PLATO classrooms around the Chicago area. Despite his misgivings about education and computer-assisted instruction, Nelson marveled at the machines and culture that had grown up so quickly in the light of the Orange Glow of PLATO IV. “As a first taste of interaction on a graphical computer system, PLATO can be a thrilling mind-opener—especially to people who think computers can only behave loutishly or through printout.”
Nelson was quick to notice one of PLATO’s greatest and most essential architectural features, the Fast Round Trip, and did not hold back in his admiration for it: “The most basic underlying feature of the system, INSTANT RESPONSE, cannot be quarreled with. PLATO can respond…to a single key-pressing by a user, almost instantly; this feature is virtually impossible on IBM systems. This responsiveness is the system’s greatest beauty.”
But he also noticed that PLATO was a community of people, an online community unlike any he had seen elsewhere in his travels:
Indeed, this extended Republic of PLATO—the systems people in Urbana, the authors and locals-in-charge throughout the network—constitute one of the maddest rookeries of computer freaks in the world. Where else would you find a fourteen-year-old systems programmer who’s had his job for two years? Where else would you see people fall in love over the Talkomatic…only to clash when at last they meet in person? Where else can you play so many different games with faraway strangers? Where else can students anywhere in the network sign into hundreds of different lessons in different subjects (most of them incomplete)? Where else are people working on various different programs for elementary statistics, all to be offered on the same system?
PLATO is one of the wonders of the world.
On any computer system there are two general populations of users: the designers and developers of the system and its software, and the end users of the system and its software. With PLATO it was no different. Within a few years of PLATO IV’s arrival, the populations had grown to significant numbers. The population of end users—the students receiving instruction through PLATO—was massive, yet disparate. The other population was smaller, tighter, and deeply interconnected: authors and instructors, professors and their grad students, administrators, operators, managers, systems staff, and anyone else with an author signon. This smaller group comprised one of the most vibrant, diverse, and early examples of what writer Howard Rheingold would later call a “virtual community.” It was certainly one of the earliest. Tragically, in one of what would be many cases of the saltwater view denying the freshwater view a chance to be known, the PLATO story went unmentioned in his essential 1993 book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.
The members of PLATO’s virtual community comprised the lucky few having access to the notesfiles, pnotes, games, instant messaging, and chat room tools like TERM-talk and Talkomatic. This virtual community comprised perhaps a single-digit percentage of the overall user population. The vast majority were the students, the actual learners, assigned to take a course or series of courses online as an academic or job requirement. They might be young children, grade schoolers, high schoolers, college students, or trainees involved in government, industry, or professional organizations. They came in, they sat down, they did what they were told using these odd computer terminals with the Orange Glow, and then they went on with their lives. In and out. Done. Their numbers were in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions if one counts up every user who ever pressed NEXT to begin in the history of PLATO across all the systems that would pop up around the world in all the years PLATO systems were operating. But this vast majority were silent and invisible, largely nonparticipants in the virtual community.
Not to say that there wasn’t leakage: some number of students, learners, and trainees would hear about the “other side” of PLATO, or even witness it, for example by looking over the shoulder of another user at another terminal (wh
y is that person laughing? why are they typing so fast? are they talking to somebody? is that a conversation?). It was in the virtual community of PLATO authors and instructors where the most unusual and most notable things happened in terms of their place in the computer history. But it is important to understand that the primary, overriding purpose of PLATO was always education, and without all those student users, there would have never been a PLATO system.
CERL’s PLATO community was not only growing, it was growing up. Many kids had discovered PLATO’s secret dimension as high school students. They were the world’s first “digital natives” (decades before that term would be coined). Now they were becoming college students, and in the seeming blink of an eye those college students were graduating or, ironically, flunking out. PLATO was maturing. Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. The more people who used PLATO, the more useful it became, attracting even more people in a virtuous cycle, making it even more valuable.
In the span of just a few years, across the 1970s, CERL’s PLATO IV system now had over a thousand terminals, and many tens of thousands of users, the majority of whom were in various clusters up and down the state of Illinois. But a significant number were out of state, from Hawaii to Delaware. By the end of the decade, there were multiple PLATO systems across North America with more on the way. These systems would be interconnected by telecommunications links, enabling users on one system to send and receive personal notes to people internally or on other systems. The total number of users—be they students, instructors, authors, gamers, or systems or administrative staffers—amounted to perhaps the largest online community in the world during that era, a number that would continue to exceed the ARPANET’s combined user count until the early 1980s.
