by Brian Dear
The Cave of PLATO, from Ted Nelson’s Dream Machines Credit 32
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It wasn’t all fun and games. Behind the Friendly Orange Glow of dots on the screen were real people, and some of them were hurting. The rise of the use of the “anonymous option” in some notesfiles like =ipr= (short for “interpersonal relationships”) and =sexnotes= gave people a way to vent, ask questions without losing their privacy, or simply call out for help.
In November 1980 a student posted a note in =ipr= describing how depressed and suicidal he felt. David C. Barnett, a doctoral student in the counseling psychology program at Iowa State University, happened to be paging through =ipr= soon afterward, and came across the student’s note. “I wrote a brief response,” he says, “describing what help I thought counseling could provide. I acknowledged that going in for counseling could be a scary experience and suggested that the writer contact me with any questions about counseling.”
Barnett continued, “As a counseling psychology graduate student, I found =ipr= very interesting—real-life discussions of the gender wars, romance gone awry, unrequited love, conflicts at work, roommate concerns, etc. At times, it felt like an Ann Landers column, but mostly it seemed like a community of people who wanted to offer support, ideas, reality checks, and encouragement to others who used PLATO. I found I tended to write a lot of responses encouraging people to get counseling or psychotherapy. After a time, it felt somewhat ludicrous to send this suggestion to the file so often, so I tended to send personal notes to people if the posting was not anonymous.”
A few nights later, Barnett happened to be working on PLATO at around eleven when a TERM-talk request flashed on his screen. He had no idea who the user was or why the person was TERM-talking him. According to Barnett the typed conversation went like this:
CALLER: hi.
BARNETT: Hi.
CALLER: are you the one who wrote the note about getting counseling in ipr?
BARNETT: Yes.
CALLER: well, I want to die.
“At this point,” Barnett says, “I gasped audibly and let out a mild oath. I certainly did not expect to be dealing with a suicidal person over a computer terminal. Bear in mind that all those cues that are so useful in counseling (the nonverbals and the nuances of the voice) were totally lacking. All I was confronted with was a black screen with print in orange letters.”
Barnett, a trained counselor, gently probed the student with questions in an effort to get him to open up and share his pain. It turned out that the student’s brother had died in a car cash, and this student felt responsible. “That night was the one-year anniversary of the accident,” says Barnett. To add to this, the student had transferred from one college to another, where he now felt isolated and alone. He was flunking exams and had thoughts of ending his life. “PLATO had been one of the few sources of pleasure he had found on his new campus,” says Barnett. “He told me of the many hours he had spent playing space war games on PLATO as well as many hours reading notesfiles. In the course of one of these frequent escapes to PLATO, he ran across the ‘suicide’ note in notesfile =ipr= that I had responded to with an invitation for questions. The original note echoed many of the feelings he was experiencing. He began thinking more and more seriously about wanting to die and took several steps.” He went home to his parents, stole his father’s gun, and brought it back to his dorm room in college. He wrote a suicide note, and planned to do the deed out in a vacant field. On the way there, he changed his mind and decided to sign on to PLATO one more time and reread the =ipr= note with Barnett’s offer for help. It was at that moment he TERM-talked Barnett. The conversation went on for well over an hour. “I felt quite nervous the entire time,” says Barnett, “and as he described more and more lethal-sounding clues, I became very fearful for him. I attempted to be as supportive as I could, despite the hundreds of miles distance between us, and tried to help him discover a local support system. After a nerve-wracking discussion, I finally uncovered his local crisis center, and he, in essence, put me on hold while he went to call them from a phone next to the terminal room. I waited for a long time—staring at an orange-bordered screen devoid of any communication from his terminal except ‘please hold on.’ By this time it was nearly 1:20 in the morning.”
Barnett waited for twenty terrifying minutes, but the student finally reappeared and resumed the TERM-talk. He told Barnett he had spoken to the crisis center. Local volunteers were dispatched, and while the student was waiting for them to arrive, Barnett continued talking with him through PLATO. “After about fifteen minutes, he announced that the two volunteers had arrived, and he was going to hang up, with a promise to send a note to me soon. I said I would hold him to that, and he signed off the system.”
A few agonizing days later, Barnett finally received a pnote from the student. The counseling center had saved his life.
There were other such occurrences on PLATO, nor were they limited to =ipr=. There were successful suicide attempts, though rare. On more than one occasion, Donald Bitzer would receive a report of a potentially suicidal PLATO user posting notes. Police or crisis counselors might be called in, or, if the identity of the user remained unknown, systems programmers would then be directed to use system privileges—whatever it took—to figure out who the note writer was. Though an anonymous note in theory was anonymous, it never truly was. There were logs to study, system utilities that could monitor who was using the system, and other means for zeroing in on the at-risk student. Oftentimes it was possible to do so in real time while a troubled student was still online. One such incident involved a student who was posting violent threats in =ipr= against his girlfriend. A systems staffer was asked to find out who was making the threats. He contacted the instructor who managed the group the student was enrolled in, and the instructor then discovered that the user was sitting a few terminals away from his girlfriend, seated at another terminal, in the same PLATO classroom.
Bitzer tended to be the go-to person for these crises, though he did not like it. (“He avoided conflict at all costs,” said one CERL staffer, “because he didn’t want to have to deal with it.”) In addition to death threats, suicide threats, pornography, hate speech, and other concerns, the number of incidents of hacking and security breaches increased over the years. Finally, Bitzer had had enough, and delegated the whole responsibility to a newly formed Security Committee comprised, reluctantly, of various CERL staffers.
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PLATO fostered local and long-distance romances and relationships with equal frequency. Countless people met their mate through Talkomatic, or TERM-talk, or through pnotes or one of the notesfiles. Being female in the CERL community was a rarity, but it came with benefits for females looking for them. Alison McGee made the pilgrimage west from IUPUI to CERL one time to meet several online friends. “My friends in Indiana thought [that] was absolutely insane at the time. They thought me ‘talking’ to people on a computer was insane too, and I wonder what they do every day now, hmm?”
McGee went on to say, “The great thing about PLATO was that a lot of people who used it were very intelligent, and it was a great way to meet other intelligent people. And that would include, of course, men. We were heavily outnumbered by the men.” She found herself “courted” by many of them, “and needless to say,” she adds, she “loved the attention.” Attention she described as follows: “One man sent a box of helium balloons to me and then drove from Illinois to take me to see The Breakfast Club. One served me dinner in his home, my first experience with rare steak (blech!), and tried to convince me that Dylan and Waits were better than Springsteen. One gave me really good memories of the top floor stairwell in the CERL building….As I recall, I only made one trip there, which now seems almost impossible to believe. It’s as if I can re-create every hour I was there, from my mouth dropping open at seeing the massive amount of PLATO terminals…compared to our three or four terminals in Indy maybe.”
McGee eventually moved to Bloomington, where s
he met her future husband. “PLATO was a real sticking point between us for a while,” she says. “My husband wanted me to get away from it. I still wonder when our society will recognize computer/email/cell phone addiction as a problem—needing 24/7 communication with another human via a machine. Back then, people just didn’t get it, now they ‘get it’ too much.”
Andy Otto was a student at UI Chicago Circle who witnessed an online romance develop between one of his best friends, Tim, and a girl in Hawaii whom Tim had met online through PLATO. “Lynn and Tim had long, deep conversations over ‘talk,’ ” says Otto, “and tied up the only lab terminal for hours.” Eventually Lynn came to Chicago and met Tim. They were married a year later.
Sometimes the romances began in a conventional way, two people meeting at some physical location, but if they were PLATO users, the system became an irresistible tool for keeping the relationship going when they could not be together. One couple, Gail and Jim, met in person first, but then continued communicating online as their homes were two hours apart, then wound up marrying. “We got to know each other through email,” says Gail. “In fact, Jim proposed to me over pnotes, and timed it such that he was with me when I was reading my email.”
The instances of people meeting and carrying on relationships through TERM-talk and Talkomatic are so numerous it can safely be said that it was a common occurrence. For instance, another couple, Jim and Susan Lawrence, became an item through Talkomatic. “She was in Baltimore,” says Jim, “using a signon designed for recreation which allowed her to access lesson Talkomatic. I was in Urbana, using my author records, and purely by chance we happened to start talking one night in Talkomatic. Our discussions continued on and off for about two months via PLATO before I called her by phone, and we eventually met face-to-face. The rest is history, as the saying goes.”
The CERL laboratory itself, intense as it was as a work environment, with people spending much of their lives there, became a site of numerous hookups, affairs, and romances. One former staffer recalls coming to work early on a Saturday morning and finding two other staffers going at it on the sofa in the lounge. More than a few CERL staffers were married to each other. Every now and then, such couples would divorce, then sometimes the two parties would remarry other staffers who had also divorced. These sorts of relationships occur in any workplace, particularly today with email, texting, Facebook, and the rest. But the online dimension was new in the 1970s, and CERL was pioneering in this aspect of human drama as much as it was in technology and computer-based education. Some even called the lab “PLATO Place” (after the TV soap opera Peyton Place). Says one former CERL staffer, “Let me tell you something. It was the 1970s. People were literally doing it in the road. It was part of the 1970s. There were a lot of young people. A lot of young, smart, active, healthy people. Stuff happened. And I can assure you that whatever stuff is alleged to have happened, it did not detract from, and probably contributed to, extra hours to work in the lab, so, you know, on that score I feel like, get over it.”
There exists a wealth of stories about the romances and breakups, marriages and divorces that can be attributed to PLATO. Two PLATO marriage stories will have to suffice here. The first involved Greg and Judy Kirkpatrick, who had met at Florida State University, and thought it might be fun to have what they called a “computer wedding.” “We didn’t publicize it,” says Greg, “we didn’t make a big deal of it, in fact the folks there didn’t even know what was going on. We had a few of her friends attend, there were about five or six people. We got married by a notary public. We had gone to the education library at Florida State, where there were a number of PLATO terminals, and we all sat down at various terminals, went into Talkomatic, and just chatted the ceremony there.” The second involves John Daleske and his wife, Reina. Being an Empire author as well as a prominent PLATO personality, he had many friends and followers both in Illinois and in Minnesota, where he had wound up working for CDC. Daleske had met Reina Jones, who was based in Columbus, Ohio, online through PLATO. Says Luke Kaven, who attended the 1977 wedding, “They met and struck up a romance and they fell in love right away, and I actually spent a few days with them with my girlfriend of the time that I met on PLATO….So we agreed to go meet in Minneapolis and stay with John and Reina and hang out there, and we got invited to their wedding.” PLATO people from all over came to the wedding. “There was his family,” Kaven says, “and then there was her family, and then there were the PLATO people, and everybody was just absolutely baffled in their two families—they had no idea what was going on with this, and whether this [was] an illicit matchup because they had done it that way or was it a cult. [These PLATO people] all seemed to know each other, but they didn’t understand. What did it mean to ‘know somebody’ through a computer? They had no concept of it. And they really looked at us like we were coming from outer space, I mean there was no precedent for them to draw on. I think they were worried—Is everybody okay and is this marriage going to be good?—and you know, we were pioneering that too, in the sense of mowing down attitudes and stereotypes of dating and relationships and so on.”
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A singular vision guided the PLATO project for its first twelve years, yet even during those years, a subtle trend began to emerge that also guided the project: give bright people a chance to be creative, get out of the way, and behold the innovation. The lab naturally attracted the kind of people who thrive when allowed to be their most creative selves, roadblocks pulled, nothing but a clear path to getting something new built. The Bitzer’s Boy Scouts phenomenon, with the creative contributions of people like Andrew Hanson and Mike Walker, was but a mere hint of what was to come. In time, as PLATO III grew inside a larger lab with a larger staff, there came the point where people would simply take initiative on their own to go build something better based on the real needs—the real pain—PLATO users, particularly authors, were experiencing. Blomme and Krueger with MONSTER and CHARPLT. And then Tenczar with the real game-changer, the TUTOR language. Each step of the way accelerated the pace of innovation in the lab, the rate at which new things were now possible because of the innovations that had been realized. By the time the PLATO IV system became operational in 1972, the rate of acceleration was dizzying. While the adults went forth to create thousands of hours of instructional lessons in every subject imaginable for use in settings ranging from kindergarten to college, the floodgates opened and a new wave of high school and college kids poured in. They found TUTOR, they saw the amazing new flat panel display terminals with their Friendly Orange Glow, and perhaps most amazing of all, they discovered that they were welcome to give this technology a try and make it do something. Now there was an army of bright young people building games, building apps, competing with each other, outdoing each other, relentlessly exploring the boundaries of possibility with PLATO, only to find that someone had successfully knocked a hole right through a boundary, expanding what was possible even further. While the mission-oriented focus was to create and deliver computer-based education at ever more economically viable costs, the hacker kids were transforming that singular vision, now a dozen years long in the tooth, to one of collaboration, community, entertainment, and creativity.
PLATO IV was no longer just a CBE project, a big bet by the federal government to see what could be done with computers deployed as automatic teachers on a large scale in school settings. That vision no longer told the whole story. If anything, the new wave of kids had defined their own singular vision: the most interesting thing you could do with a computer network is fill it with people—give them ways to connect, collaborate, communicate, quarrel, yak, play. Over forty years ago the young people of CERL paved the way to the inevitable future that we take for granted today. Build a sufficiently broad and extensible set of interactive tools that allow for communication between users of a computer system, and the result is PLATO. CompuServe, the Source. The WELL. Prodigy. AOL. The World Wide Web. Google. Facebook.
Throughout the 1970s, the new
wave of kids had transformed the PLATO system beyond its educational mission into something much more generalized: an online service, a concept that at the time was sure to trip up anyone outside the PLATO community. No one person within CERL had been responsible for the rise of this community—not even Bitzer. But collectively, they achieved something so ahead of its time it is still hard to comprehend given how early it all happened relative to what came later.
So what were they going to do with all of this technology? How could CERL transform all of this innovation, this virtual community, from a still relatively obscure, you-had-to-be-there experience centered in a small Illinois town surrounded by miles of cornfields, to something massive and mainstream?
Bitzer had known since day one back in 1960 that PLATO did not survive unless it scaled. Go big or go home.
It was time to go big.
Part III
GETTING TO SCALE
It is hard to fail, but it is worse to have never tried to succeed.
—Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life”
Optimism is a bias. That is, you look at the world, and you get the odds wrong.
—Daniel Kahneman, “Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think”
