by Brian Dear
The Hawaiians named this island “Oahu,” which any tour guide will tell you means “gathering place.” In 2013, an auspicious gathering of people and coincidences would assemble in Waimanalo, at the foot of the towering, green, ancient volcanic mountain wall, known as the Ko’olau Range, looming over windward Oahu like a cresting, miles-long, thousand-foot-high wave.
While the Bloodthirsty played, one blood-red team jersey caught Lockard’s eye. Above a large white number 32 was the name “MARCY.” For Brodie Lockard, to see that name on the jersey of a Stanford team member, and to hear teammates call that name during the game, stirred painful memories. From the sidelines, Brodie did the math. 2013 minus 1979…enough years had passed. And this Frisbee-flinging Marcy kid was a student at Stanford, as was Ted Marcy, a name Lockard knew well, back in the early 1970s.
Could this kid be Ted’s son?
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Ted Marcy was to gymnastics what Jimi Hendrix was to rock music. Marcy’s specialty, back when he competed on the Stanford men’s gymnastics team, was the pommel horse. He not only mastered it, he owned it. Some refer to him even now as a “freak,” a “mutant”—terms that gymnasts use not to insult but to offer the highest form of praise. One physical fitness trainer who knew Marcy back then once blogged about him this way:
I had read about Marcy for years during high school and NOBODY swung like him, no one had the hip extension he did. He made EVERYBODY look weak on the horse….And what an inspiration! This guy TRAINED! Like an animal. Obsessive in the very best way. He would do ten routines in a row and EACH ONE LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE THE OTHER! He would do THOUSANDS of nothing but CIRCLES. Forever….And they had to be perfect. Every, single, one….The guy had control like hadn’t been seen before, and his scissors were from another planet. So much better than everyone else, he looked like a man among children. He would also swim, run, and stretch like a maniac and he was the rarest of the rare: a pommel horse SPECIALIST. That would drive most normal men mad. He set the stage and the standard….Once people had seen how it could be done, nothing less would do.
Marcy was a hero and Stanford legend to Brodie Lockard as well. Brodie had been a gymnast in high school in Tucson, and upon enrolling in Stanford in 1977 wound up on the same men’s gymnastics team on which Marcy, who had already graduated, had excelled.
Gymnastics is an unusual sport. It’s almost never a career. “Thing is, after college, you’re done,” says Jeffery Chung, a Stanford teammate of Brodie’s. After college, you either go to the Olympics—a rare feat—or you get a day job and get on with your life (though some gymnasts have long careers with entertainment acts like Cirque du Soleil). Gymnasts do it because they love it: the required concentration, the physical stamina, the solitary laser-focus, the risks and dangers. Gymnastics is something you grab and never let go your whole life. It is a way of living. At Stanford, that level of dedication meant demanding, four-hour practices, six days a week.
December 6, 1979, fell during the week before finals, so some teammates were off studying. It started out like just another day of practice for Brodie and the team. But the day ended with Brodie in the hospital, where he would stay for the next nine months.
Most of what he knows of that day is based on what others have told him over the years. Like all gymnastics gyms, Stanford’s had a “landing pit,” or “crash pit,” as gymnasts often call it. In Stanford’s case it had been placed between the high bar on one side, and the trampoline on the other. The pit consisted of layers of foam rubber mats and foam gym pillows, which in the 1970s were still pretty primitive, says Lockard. In fact the whole pit was makeshift. The team coach, Sadao Hamada, “had put one together that was pretty homemade,” Brodie recalls. “It had old volleyball nets on the sides, and it really didn’t have enough foam in it.” The nets were used to hold the pillows in place as gymnasts landed on them. Says Brodie, “The idea is that you could land in the foam in any position and not get hurt.” He could practice dismounts from either the high bar or the trampoline, and land in the pit.
Brodie was dismounting from the trampoline into the foam, when—he’s not sure but thinks he was practicing a twist while in the middle of a flip—something went wrong. “I just jumped too high and too far, and landed where there was like a foot of foam, which didn’t do anything to break my fall.”
Teammates were not the only ones who saw him fall hard. There was another witness in the gym that day: Ted Marcy. He should not have been there. He’d graduated several years earlier, and was by 1979 almost a full MD, in his fourth year as a medical student at Yale University. “I was visiting the gymnastics gym for old times’ sake,” Marcy says. “As I was waiting to get up on the pommel horse, I saw someone come off the trampoline into the crash pit and then not move. I had a bad feeling, and knew I needed to go over to check on him.” Marcy remembers Brodie lying faceup, eyes open, and vividly remembers asking him three questions: “CAN YOU MOVE YOUR FEET? CAN YOU MOVE YOUR ARMS? CAN YOU BREATHE?” Says Marcy, “The answer to the last question was a minimal shake of his head.” That prompted Marcy to shout for help.
What Brodie was told later, is that his hero, the one and only Ted Marcy, had been in the Stanford gym that day, why?—how?—and not only that, had even seen him fall, and not only that, had rushed over to offer help, and not only that, had given him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before the paramedics arrived. (“Which is pretty cool,” Brodie says, with a wide grin.) But beyond those sketchy details, Brodie remembers nothing of the accident itself or of the next four days. His spinal injury was serious and life-threatening. Often a victim of such an injury dies within minutes right on the spot, due to the paralysis affecting not only arms and legs, but of the diaphragm muscle. Lose that, and you can’t breathe, so you suffocate and die. Had not someone knowledgeable like Marcy, not only an experienced gymnast but also a fourth-year medical student, been there, at the right time and at the right place, to recognize what was going on, waste no time making the right diagnosis and start providing the proper immediate care, Brodie would probably not have lived.
“The accident was devastating to everybody involved,” says Andy Geiger, Stanford’s athletics director at the time. “It was just unbelievable, and a miracle that Ted was there. Brodie, and Brodie’s family, I will never ever forget as long as I live. It was one of the worst days of my life.”
—
Jeffery Chung was one year older than Brodie, but they graduated from high schools the same year. While Brodie was a self-described “desert rat” growing up in Tucson, Arizona, Chung had grown up in Honolulu and attended twelve years at the Iolani School before entering Stanford. During his high school years, Jeff was dating a girl over at Punahou School. In her class was a kid named Barack Obama.
Lockard had entered Stanford as an English major, but then realized he might have more luck in the job market by taking math and computer science courses. Chung, on the other hand, pursued an intensive premed track heavy on chemistry and biology. Both Chung and Lockard joined the Stanford gym team as freshmen in the fall of 1977.
But before Chung moved to California, during the final months of his senior year at Iolani, he and some friends heard about a cool computer named PLATO, located over in a lab at the University of Hawaii’s nearby Manoa campus. They had no affiliation with the university; they were simply drawn, like moths to flame, to the system like so many others had been.
Inside a campus building were four PLATO IV terminals sporting the Orange Glow. Chung remembers watching as others played games that he would learn were called Empire and Airfight. He was instantly hooked. He was soon sneaking out of his house each night, dashing over to the building, and playing online often until dawn. Then, he says, “I’d stagger home and fall asleep.” To this day he believes his parents never knew about his nightly escapades—although his mother did wonder, Why is Jeffery always so tired during the day? “My mom thought there was something wrong with me,” he says with glee.
Arriving at Stanford, he’d befr
iended Brodie and told him about PLATO and its incredible games back in Hawaii. “I was thinking, wouldn’t that be a great company, a business idea, to have networked gaming?” he says. “There was no Internet or anything like that, so I didn’t know how that was going to happen. I just imagined all these people calling in on phone lines, over modems, to play against each other. We used to play against guys in Champaign-Urbana or wherever PLATO was hooked up. It was the first time I’d played this kind of a networking game.”
Chung dove into his studies, but did visit one of Stanford’s computer labs to play “their version of Star Trek,” he says. “It was nothing compared to PLATO, and then I just stopped.”
The fun and addictive aspects of PLATO’s multiplayer games had fascinated him—and yet now he was at Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley, largely oblivious to the very notion of such games. It would not catch on there for years, and when it finally did, it was as if PLATO never existed.
—
Months before his accident, Lockard had gone home to Tucson for the summer. Chung’s frequent PLATO stories had gotten him curious about the system, which was unavailable on the Stanford campus, thanks in part, Lockard says, to Professor Pat Suppes, whose competing computer-assisted instruction work (and funding grants) might have been threatened by PLATO. Brodie’s father was a professor of architecture at the University of Arizona, which, unlike Stanford, had embraced PLATO, leasing a number of terminals dialed up to CERL. Professor Lockard planned to use PLATO in his architectural drawing class, but needed a TUTOR programmer to create the lesson. Brodie, who had just taken his first programming classes in assembly language and Pascal at Stanford, got the job, and over the summer created a tutorial lesson called “Edges,” which introduced the concept of “spatial edges.” One instructional page of Brodie’s lesson included the following text:
In addition to the surfaces in the environment, our evolutionary history has led us to pay attention to edges in the environment. It is from behind these edges that our enemies have always appeared, and over these edges that the more awkward members of our species have always fallen.
“Edges” shows a 3D drawing of a box with thick walls. The box appears to be empty inside, but as the student progresses through the lesson, a little man peeks out from the inside front edge of the box, his long nose drooping over the edge, Kilroy-style. Such was the ability of PLATO that the little man graphic could be superimposed in different positions in and around the edges of the box. Some positions made perceptual sense, and some didn’t. The lesson was designed to help students learn that some edges are different—they’re spatial—they indicate a spatial discontinuity. The brain has evolved to know that behind some edges things can exist and behind other edges it would not make sense. The student was supposed to touch those edges of the box that were spatial edges. When the student correctly touched a spatial edge, PLATO responded by thickening the line. If the lesson detected that the student wasn’t getting the concepts right, the student was directed to a review section in which a simpler box was drawn. It was hard to get all the answers right, and easy to fall into that forced review section.
By the time Brodie got back to Stanford for his junior year, he was hooked on PLATO. He’d been on it all summer, with author privileges, climbing the Ziggurat, becoming part of the culture. He knew TUTOR, he had discovered the online community, the notesfiles, the TERM-talks, the games, and the sheer presence of people online. “I thought PLATO was one of the coolest things I had ever seen,” Brodie says.
Back at Stanford, September 1979, and Apple Computer’s Apple II personal computer sales were booming. The next big wave of microcomputers, from the Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, and IBM PC, was still months or years away. Steve Jobs had not yet made his visit to Xerox PARC—that would happen in December. Silicon Valley was ignorant of PLATO, focused instead on things PLATO users would have considered trifling. Silicon Valley start-up visionaries would not wake up to the online world for years to come. Most of the few who had seen PLATO brushed it off as an extravagant waste, a mainframe-based relic that had no relevance in the booming micro revolution that was under way.
Brodie had seen the future but now he was back in the past. He’d lost access. He wanted a terminal in his dorm room. Could he rent one? He contacted CDC and spoke to a sales rep named Cindy Poulos. The costs for leasing a terminal and phone line were astronomical. He might as well have asked to rent an exotic sports car. His hopes for PLATO were dashed, but his interest never left.
—
And then in December, the accident. He woke up in a hospital and began a long rehabilitation, including learning to breathe with an artificial breathing apparatus, the ability to breathe on his own now gone. He lay there with nothing to do. Jeff Chung would visit and they talked about PLATO and how Brodie dreamed of being productive again if only he had access. He asked his father if it was possible to get PLATO at the hospital. Maybe they would cut Brodie a break? He probably would never walk or move his arms or legs again, which meant no typing at a keyboard, but he still could think, he still had ambitions, he was still burning with ideas. On PLATO his disabilities would not matter. PLATO was a meeting of minds, pure and simple, and Brodie’s mind was fine.
His father reached out to Cindy Poulos. She was so moved by Brodie’s tragedy, she made a special trip to visit him at the hospital. Then, a surprise. “She brought her personal terminal from home for me to use in a hospital,” says Brodie. “It was amazing.” It was not a PLATO IV, but a big CDC IST-1. But it was PLATO, and with it he was once again connected. “People in my office would not have approved such a thing,” Poulos says, “so I always just told them the terminal was out on loan.”
“We had to find a closet to put it in, to lock it up,” recalls Brodie. Then a phone line had to be connected. Luckily, the hospital went along with his requests, and let him have his way. (Brodie suspects the phone bill was probably tacked on to his gigantic hospital bill nine months later.) Knowing the terminal was right down the hall in a closet, and knowing that the PLATO community was reachable through it, gave Brodie a reason to hang on, at a time when most people might not have had the will or the strength to carry on. “It really kept me going,” he says. “It gave me a reason to get up in the morning, and something to work on….It was my main, my most enjoyable, activity in the hospital.”
—
During Brodie’s long hospital stay, well into the summer of 1980, part of his rehabilitation included learning how to use a typewriter with a mouth stick. Connected to one end of the long dowel is a rubbery grip like a mouth guard, which the user bites down and then, as he moves his neck and head up, down, and around, he positions the other end of the stick to tap any desired key on the keyboard. It was awkward, but by the time Poulos’s PLATO terminal had arrived, he’d mastered the mouth stick.
He had also taken up an interest in a board game that one of the hospital staff introduced him to and that they would play every now and then: an old Chinese tile game called Mah-Jongg. There are many different versions of the game, with different rules and number of pieces. The version Brodie played consisted of 144 tiles, each tile having a certain symbol or number signifying which class or group it belonged to. The goal is to match one tile with another identical one, and remove them from the formation. To win, remove all the tile pairs. But it’s not easy. Many tiles are placed on top of others, in layers, and there are tricky rules about which tiles you can remove and which ones you can’t until others have been removed first.
Mah-Jongg is played in numerous ways, sometimes with four people, sometimes like solitaire. Brodie learned about a tile layout called “The Turtle,” which involved placing tiles in such a way that a very primitive “turtle” was formed, the “back” of which, in the center, was the thickest, with several layers of tiles. Brodie liked the game and, once he got Poulos’s terminal, he thought about programming a PLATO version of the game.
PLATO’s 512 x 512 graphics and touch screen were i
deal. The screen resolution was high enough to provide a crisp rendering of the 144-tile “turtle” layout, and the tiles could be big enough that they could be touched. It was as if PLATO were intentionally designed just for Mah-Jongg.
But how to represent layers of tiles? After all, the game requires some tiles to be laid on top of others, as in the board game. On the PLATO screen, with an essentially 2D top-down view, how would a player notice that some tiles were on top of others? Lockard’s solution: thicken the sides—bevel the edges—of particular tiles. The higher up the tile layer, the thicker the border. The overall design not only worked, but produced perhaps the most striking, beautiful game display ever created on PLATO. To this day, it evokes wonder from people who view it for the first time, and sometimes, for the thousandth time. What made his design even more striking was the painstaking detail of the calligraphy and numbers on each tile. On an original PLATO IV terminal, the effect is a sublime orange vision. The thick borders of the higher layers of tiles made the center region of the screen glow like embers of a fire. He pushed the envelope on PLATO in ways nobody else had thought of, taking PLATO as far as he possibly could.
Incredibly, over months, he built the entire thing one tap at a time with his mouth stick.
To understand what a monumental achievement this was, consider that the 144 tiles each had different works of art on them, and each of those drawings, icons, Chinese calligraphic symbols, and numbers and letters was copied from the tile designs he’d seen in the hospital’s board game, one by one, using PLATO’s graphical character set editor. It took weeks just to create those graphics. He also wrote all of the TUTOR code for the game with the mouth stick. PLATO’s TUTOR editor lacked modern scrollable windows: instead it required typing frequent commands just to move around in the code. A piece of cake for an able-handed person, a slow process for a mouth stick user. And yet, Brodie persevered.
