by Brian Dear
He claims that he reported the situation to CDC’s lawyers back at headquarters, and he says they simply told him never to repeat the story again. In the end, PLATO never took off in Venezuela, but one notable, wholly unexpected thing emerged from it: perhaps the most extraordinary, advanced, and unusual MUD game ever created on PLATO, developed by a CDC employee named Mark Johnson while he was stationed there: Drygulch.
Johnson, like Smith, had been stationed in Iran for several years, doing pre- and post-sales support for CDC’s emerging data processing services—not PLATO related at all—including atomic energy, Iran’s state television and radio, and other sites in the oil and gas industries. Everything was fine until the day arrived when he and his family had to evacuate, leaving all of their possessions behind and living for the next few months out of suitcases, first in London and then back in the U.S. Eventually CDC told him that Iran was essentially over, and they moved him and his family up to a hotel in Minneapolis. He got in touch with his boss Mike Smith, and learned that Smith was now in Venezuela. Smith hired him, and the Johnson family packed up and moved to Caracas. There, he found a PLATO terminal in a small makeshift data center CDC had started, its hopes high that it would expand into a major facility with multiple CYBERs supporting myriad PLATO terminals, not to mention offering other services to the oil and other industries.
Johnson’s official job was to support the fledgling data center the company had set up for clients. There were no CYBERs or big hardware there, only terminals, printers, and a plotter. CDC had a single high-speed T-1 communications line back to Minneapolis. Occasionally the few CDC salesmen would land a deal with a company that wanted to run some program off of one of the CYBERs in the U.S., so they would come in and work from a terminal. But life was quiet, and Johnson settled in at the PLATO terminal with not much to do. He would bring his children in to play around with the educational games on PLATO, including many of the elementary math games, which they loved. “Drygulch” was one of the towns the little choo-choo train stops at in Bonnie Seiler’s How the West Was One elementary math game, and Johnson got the idea for his MUD from there and from another game centered around horse races. He took the dungeons and dragons motif and turned it on its head. What if, instead of orcs, goblins, wizards, swords, and sorcery, he placed a MUD in a Wild West setting, where the “dungeon” became a gold mine, on the outskirts of a Wild West town? What if, instead of the various primitive stores in the “city” sections of games like Moria and Avatar, he let players visit various stores in the town? Johnson created a town hall, bank, general store, assay office (where you took the ore you’d dug up in the mine, to get weighed and converted into money, or, if you were up for it, you could shoot the proprietor), Kitty’s Saloon (“known throughout the West”), a sheriff’s office and jail, a stable, a hotel, and Boot Hill, the local cemetery. Visitors could enter and interact in any of those establishments; each had their own contextual menus of possible options, some of which helped your game character, and some of which might end you up in the jail—or Boot Hill. Johnson even went further, creating a local town government with a mayor, sheriff, and inspector, all roles that players could run for in elections (“voting takes place during odd-numbered years,” the game explained). Beyond the usual Dnd player characteristics like strength and dexterity, he added injuries, hunger, thirst, carrying (how many pounds of items and minerals you could carry), and a separate set of vitality, hunger, thirst, and carrying values for the player’s mule, which you could buy at the Smith & Sons Livery Stable for $1,000 of game money. Johnson even integrated a PLATO notesfile into the game, =gulchnts=, where players could announce that they were running for election, or read notices—automatically posted into the notesfile by the game itself—relating to election results, who’s in jail, who died, and other news and gossip. The mine itself had its own set of “monsters”—instead of dragons and the usual Dnd fare, he had rats, bats, spiders, bears, and coyotes. Players could use the “f” key to attempt to fight the creatures, “s” to “swear” at them (“Swearing, if done right, is very effective, driving the animals away at once,” said the Drygulch help lesson); “i” to ignore them (“When it works, it works well, but you must not move or show fear”), “e” to evade (if your dexterity was high enough), or “r” to run in panic (“a good last resort”). The great PLATO god of chance, Randu, was everywhere in this game like in every other game. Each time you acted, Randu considered your action, and the outcome might work to your advantage—or not.
All of this Johnson did on his own while stationed in Caracas, using a terminal connected to CDC’s PLATO system 4,500 miles away in Minneapolis. After two years in Venezuela, he and his family packed up and moved back to the U.S.
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The deals put in place in 1974 between CERL and CDC to commercialize PLATO were held up by lawyers and the government. “There was substantial resistance,” says Bob Morris, “within the university and by members of the National Science Foundation to transferring technology to a profit-making corporation. Further, there were a number of fundamental principles which had substantial influence in the negotiations; e.g., academic freedom vs. proprietary protection, public domain requirements on government-sponsored research, profit making vs. nonprofit exploitation of the technology, etc. It took until spring of 1976 to hammer out all of the issues, and conclude with a set of legal agreements. There were hundreds of pages of legal documents in the form of five separate contracts covering different aspects of the research program and technology licensing. After more than two years of lawyers and bureaucrats haggling, the finished agreements were consistent with the frame agreement worked out by John Dammeyer, Don Bitzer, and myself.”
One of the major sticking points at Illinois that held up the deal for months concerned questions on copyright and royalties. If Control Data were going to roll out PLATO all over the world, perhaps in a few years, deploying hundreds of mainframes and millions of users, making many lessons CERL staffers and UI professors had developed in hundreds of subjects available to customers, how would they get paid? Would they get paid? One thing UI decided to do was make every PLATO author sign an author agreement, to which they would receive a PLATO author card. The royalty rate infuriated many at Illinois. Stan Smith, the chemistry professor whose lessons were so good they were a highlight of many demos around the world—including the NSF presentation that may have single-handedly won funding for PLATO—was apoplectic at what he felt were extremely low payouts for authors. He wrote a long letter to Don Bitzer pleading for him to do something, pointing out that for every student contact hour of lesson usage, the ratio of what CDC would make to what the PLATO author would make was more than a hundred to one.
Donald Bitzer in the CERL machine room, 1970s Credit 40
Dan Alpert was by this time largely out of the picture and not involved in the decision-making process, much to his regret. He blames Bitzer for the stingy royalty amounts. “He negotiated very hard on the income for the plasma display panel, and for the PLATO license, but not for courseware,” says Alpert. It would be a sore point among the authoring community and many professors at Illinois for years to come.
The effect the CDC-Illinois deal had on CERL was significant. “It became like independent little companies inside the laboratory,” recalls former CERL staffer Lezlie Fillman, “who were protecting their product, because of this business that they might be able to get royalties from the stuff that they develop. So the math project didn’t speak to the reading project, didn’t talk to PCP, didn’t talk to community colleges, and there was very, very little sharing of the ideas that these groups were coming up with and I’m sure it was because all of a sudden people said, ‘Well, gee, if I develop this and put my name on it as an author, then I’m going to get royalties from it.’ ” People stopped cooperating, she says. “And there became a lot of infighting inside the lab about who was going to get at a particular concept first. Who was going to be able to put their product out there and begin
to rack up student contact hours, which is where the royalties came from. Rather than being an all-lab push it became instantly factionalized.”
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Perhaps one reason why CDC was not generous in its royalty payments to Illinois is that it did not consider many of the lessons any good. CERL by this time had many thousands of student contact hours’ worth of lessons in subjects from algebra to zoology, but the quality of the material varied. Even Bitzer would admit during this era that at least half the lessons were of uneven quality, often ineffective and poorly designed. Others were even less kind, sometimes citing Sturgeon’s Law, which states, “90 percent of everything is crap.”
CDC decided that it would create a new organization devoted to designing, developing, publishing, and selling new, original PLATO courseware in addition to the CERL offerings. Bill Ridley and Bob Linsenman were two VPs involved with this new undertaking.
Peter Rizza, a Penn State PhD who managed courseware design in the new organization, says, “You have to realize that in the early days of PLATO, there were no authoring systems, or learning management systems, or design platforms to use to create any of the PLATO lessons. There was only [TUTOR] programming, and since programmers were not educators, the initial results were technically impressive but educationally weak. It took a few of us some time to influence the management team that investing in good tools would help the technology become more useful and ultimately generate more business for CDC. It was five people who initiated the first move in this direction. Under the leadership of John Dammeyer and Bob Morris, people like Bob Linsenman, Mike Allen—and I will include myself as well—started looking at ways to make PLATO more successful.”
Jim Glish, who had started out using PLATO at UI for animated graphics and multimedia and eventually moved to CDC, recalls that in the early days CDC’s PLATO publishing group had difficulty with the notion of what Silicon Valley would call a “product-market fit.” The group, he says, “was tasked by Norris to come up with potential course subjects to build courses around. And they had no clue what they were doing, they didn’t have any training background, they were publishers. They waited for people to come to them with good ideas. How were they going to come up with a sample market? They didn’t really have any market research experiences because they hired some PhDs who didn’t know a market from a stick in the ground anyway. What they did—and this is a true story—they actually had a board, with probably two hundred subject areas on it. And they threw darts at it to pick subjects that they were going to develop courses for. That was the scientific marketing that was done.”
Ted Martz, a longtime PLATO marketing person at CDC, recalls similar strangeness coming out of the publishing organization. Martz had been tasked to evaluate the courseware that was coming out of Control Data for quality control purposes. “It was classic. What was happening was I was evaluating the courseware, or my group was, and, yes, the lessons were working, they didn’t bomb out, they didn’t have any fatal errors, they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, but what was frustrating was, no one was going out and ever really checking to say, Is there really a market for this effort that we’re doing?”
Martz goes on to say, “There were things on dairy farming, growing tomatoes….Primarily it was the agricultural group that Control Data tried to introduce…a whole thing towards helping the farming community, and PLATO was going to be a major portion of that. They were going to teach farmers how to better manage their livestock, how to grow specialty crops, so that they could get a better profit on their land. The only problem was, of course, that the farmers that they were thinking this was going to be a boon to were the people that were hard pressed to part with $1,000 a month for an access charge into this system. And so they completely misread their target market. I mean that was just an example…and then they wondered years later why they couldn’t get anybody to sign up.”
“The publishing group, I believe, was given license to steal,” says Glish. “They basically were some higher-paid people in the company, they came out of the publishing background, and they were simply taking money from internal sources, to line the pockets of their division, and make a paper profit, regardless of whether the product they were producing were salable or not….The whole emphasis on trying to make money with PLATO early on begged the issue of having to build the marketplace. You don’t build a marketplace by throwing darts at a board and just seeing what’s going to fly. Got to do a little bit more talking to customers and analyzing things. Now, eventually they ended up coming up with some pretty good markets like the robotics and the automotive skills training and so on, but that came out of direct customer feedback, rather than this early stuff, which was just hit-or-miss game playing.”
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At some point in early 1976, the Soviet Union, still interested in PLATO, sent a delegation to CDC’s Arden Hills, Minnesota, PLATO facility for another round of meetings and demos. “They had been speaking with CDC,” says Greg Warren, hired by Dammeyer in 1974 to join his PLATO team, “about using the system to help educate their folks at remote areas. Other than the communications challenges, they were really excited about using it and wanted to see it.”
Warren describes what happened next:
The day approached where they were to be at CDC HQ for a full day of discussions, then to Arden Hills the next afternoon to see the computer system/room and for demos, etc. I recall the State Department was joining them for the visit and this was really a big deal for everyone. (Lots of special security and spooky-looking guys walking around Arden Hills—didn’t want the Russians stealing technology was the word in the hallway.) Being a system controller, it was my responsibility to make sure the PLATO system was up by 7 a.m. every day, so I was in the office by 6:30….About 7:30 the morning the Russians were due at CDC HQ, I got a call from John’s son Eric [Dammeyer] saying that his father had collapsed getting ready for work and had been taken to the hospital—had no other information. I sat there stunned for a couple of minutes, then finally woke up and ran up the hall to Tom Moore’s office and told him what had happened. The CDC delegation all stared in disbelief, and Tom asked them to consider this preliminary information and to keep preparing for the day as normal. Tom asked me to stay, and he called Bill Norris’s office and asked if they had heard anything, but this was news to them. While Tom was on the phone with them, Eric and Maytie Lou [John Dammeyer’s wife] called on another line and were providing information.
As for the meeting, Warren says, the “demo went on as scheduled and things ultimately worked out okay—the Russians were impressed.” But as for John Dammeyer, he had suffered an aneurysm. “They got him to ER quickly enough,” says Warren, “and he made it through surgery. His speech was a bit slurred and drawn-out for a few months, but ultimately he was doing quite well and pretty much a full recovery.”
However, Dammeyer was out of the office for months, at a crucial time for CDC and particularly for PLATO. Tom Moore stepped in to run the PLATO project. Warren recalls that Maytie Lou believed stress “was literally killing him [Dammeyer] and that he should probably consider a career change. His doctors agreed.” Dammeyer met with Bill Norris and Bob Price, another top executive, and everyone agreed that Dammeyer’s reign over PLATO was over. He took on less stressful work, but eventually quit, packed up, and moved to Arizona.
“John, without question,” says Greg Warren, “was the smartest man I have ever met. That is saying something. Not just ‘smart’ smart, but business and logic smart. The kind of guy who could join just about any conversation about a problem, listen intently for a few minutes, and then with about three questions zero in directly at the real problem. He was amazing. A good man, a good friend, and he did a lot for PLATO in the early days when it needed attention, commitment, nurturing, vision, and funding.”
It is hard to calculate how much damage the loss of a decisive leader like Dammeyer did to PLATO’s potential and its launch into the marketplace by CDC. The company did its bes
t to line up a capable replacement, but they chose an outsider who lacked the history, the CERL relationships, and Dammeyer’s passion and vision for PLATO. Incredibly, Bob Morris had been passed over (“We all thought Bob a shoo-in,” says Warren), and nothing would be the same again.
