The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

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  While Brodie may have felt his original contract with Activision was not ideal, it did after a while bring in considerable income. One day, sometime around 1988, Brodie got a call from one of the bosses of his Activision producer Brad Fregger telling him, “We struck a deal with Radio Shack a little while ago, and I have a check for you for $40,000.”

  “Could…you repeat that?” Brodie told the guy.

  “So at that point,” Brodie recalls, “things started coming in. And it was a lovely stream of income for many, many years.”

  Ever the entrepreneur, Brodie looked for new ways to channel his creative output to Activision, hoping they in turn would channel more money his way. Brad Fregger was producer for another Activision game, Solitaire Royale, and Brodie landed the job of doing the ports of Solitaire on the Mac and then on Apple’s new Color Mac. Activision eventually came out with Shanghai 2.0, for which Brodie developed the Color Mac version. “The guy who did the Amiga port made it 3D and color and I thought wow, that looks great, so that’s what I did on Shanghai 2.0.” In addition, Brodie had developed an add-on to the game, hoping to make a little extra money. Activision decided not to publish it, but they did agree to include his flyer in their Shanghai 2.0 packaging. “I made $4,000, which was enough to buy a scanner back then, so that’s what I did with it,” he says.

  Activision then decided to launch a remake of Shanghai called Shanghai II, which arguably was Shanghai 3.0 but with the roman numeral II. They hired someone else to develop it, but for one reason or another the developer and Activision parted ways. Brodie offered to do it, only this time he negotiated a contract more favorable to himself. Activision’s CEO by this time was Bobby Kotik. Brodie negotiated a deal with him directly. “How about no advance of any kind, and my royalties go to 14 percent?” Brodie suggested. Kotik agreed. “And that turned out to be a very lucky move.” It would make him a lot more money than the first Shanghai. “Shanghai II bought my house” in Hawaii, he says. From the living room window he has a commanding view of the nearby Ko’olau Range, looming over him.

  According to Brad Fregger, Shanghai “became one of the most played computer games in the world, selling over ten million copies in all of its variations.” For Brodie, who started the original Shanghai in 1985, the last Activision royalty check came somewhere around 2001. “So,” he says, “I had a pretty good run.”

  At some point in the early 1990s, Brodie took a trip with his family to see one of his grandparents, who lived in Illinois. For fun, he asked that they stop in Champaign-Urbana to visit CERL—to make, he’d admit years later, a pilgrimage to the old Power House, to the source of the Orange Glow, where it all began. “We were just driving around and I just wanted to stop by and take a look….We actually went in…I looked in the doorway.”

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  With the Activision income dried up, and Brodie now based in a new home in Hawaii, he decided to get consulting jobs doing programming for three separate technology start-up companies. Just in case one of them went belly-up, he’d continue to have a steady stream of income. Plus, he wanted to do a new game. Consulting gave him a financial cushion while he explored working on a new game.

  The new game eventually to emerge was called Yucatan. Instead of arranged tiles like Mah-Jongg and Shanghai, Yucatan was made of colored stone blocks, arranged to form Ziggurats. Once again, the same pattern reappeared, a pattern that had been recurring in every game Brodie had made since Mah-Jongg on PLATO. Perhaps all along the pile of tiles in his games had represented—and were his way of coming to terms with—the cushions of the crash pit back in the fateful Stanford gym.

  Instead of the success he’d had with Activision, he found no interest from the newer generation of publishers. Times had changed. Even in a world now with billions of computer users, it was near impossible to make a hit game anymore. Players have too much choice. Smartphone apps are cheap or free. Web games are worse: developers might make a few pennies per sale. Brodie’s Yucatan still exists on three casual gaming websites, and over several years he’s only made a tiny amount of money, not enough to live on. He gets by on consulting jobs.

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  So there Brodie was, watching the annual Kaimana Klassik in Waimanalo in February 2013, spotting this kid on the Bloodthirsty team with “MARCY” emblazoned on his shirt. After the game, Brodie talked to him.

  “Are you related to Ted Marcy?”

  “He’s my father,” Jordan Marcy replied.

  “Well, he kept me alive,” Brodie said. “He helped keep me alive when I broke my neck until the paramedics got there.”

  “You’re the trampoline guy!”

  “Yeah.”

  Incredibly, Brodie then learned that Jordan’s parents were, at that very moment, already en route to Hawaii, their first-ever trip. Their destination was Kauai, but they also planned a couple of days on Oahu—the “gathering place,” indeed.

  Jordan emailed, and, to be extra sure the message got through, texted his parents, who had already left their Vermont home. On a layover in Chicago they received the messages, and made arrangements to stop and visit Brodie.

  “The three of us were able to meet there for a very magical lunch together,” Ted Marcy recalls. “What are the chances that all of these things would align to make that time possible?”

  Since then, they’ve struck up a correspondence. “The coincidences keep coming,” says Ted. “My daughter, Ariel, also a Stanford grad, has designed computer games for educational purposes, and my son will be a software development engineer at Amazon Lab126 next year. What is Brodie? A computer programmer who likes to design games. He has corresponded with them to give encouragement. I am a pulmonary physician and spent some time during my fellowship learning about phrenic nerve pacemakers for people with high cervical cord injuries. Brodie has depended on these to support his ventilation. I am also familiar with ventilatory techniques to assist with chronic neurological conditions. He and I have since corresponded on ways to improve his endurance, I think with some success, according to Brodie’s very careful quantitative observations.”

  “After my conversation with Ted Marcy,” says Brodie, “I adjusted my breathing equipment schedule. For the first time since 2005, I can now do something useful and engaging—talk, compute, drive—nearly all the time I’m up, without debilitating neck and shoulder pain. It’s marvelous, and I’m enjoying every minute!”

  Marcy says his lunch with Brodie was the highlight of 2013. As for taking credit for saving Brodie’s life, he downplays his role, maintaining that he still doesn’t recall providing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after Brodie’s fall, saying that everything remains “a blur.” “The real credit,” he says, “for how well Brodie has done in the intervening thirty-four years goes to the health care professionals at Stanford Med Center, to those at the rehab facility, to Brodie’s family, and particularly and especially to Brodie himself. It is remarkable what he has accomplished.”

  To this day, Brodie is quick to acknowledge how Marcy and PLATO both played key roles not only in saving his life, and in giving him a new one. PLATO “got me out of bed,” Brodie says, “when I couldn’t do anything else. For day, after day, after day, for months and months. It was a wonderful social connection for me. For the first couple years after my injury, it was hard to do much. So I loved going into Dnd games and chatting with people in TERM-talk and all the other great things it could do. It was a marvel….Besides being a great deal of fun, and socially enabling, it was a terrific tool for me. It helped me get a master’s, it let me do my homework.”

  He no longer uses a mouth stick. With a tinge of regret he says, “My neck is kind of shot” from the all those years of moving mouse cursors this way or that, accumulating thousands, perhaps millions, of repetitive stresses on his neck and shoulders. He does still use the HeadMaster device, the same product that originally came out in 1985 and that he used when programming Shanghai. All these years later, these old devices are now very rare. “I bought
the last two I could find,” he says. “I just move my head like that and it moves the cursor….It’s worked wonderfully for me since 1985.” Personics, the manufacturer, came out with a newer model in the late 1980s called the HeadMaster Plus, which Brodie has as well. Unfortunately, it was the last version Personics produced. While numerous medical supply websites claim that they have HeadMasters in inventory, it turns out they don’t. Brodie has checked them all.

  Nothing newer, no shiny twenty-first-century technology, beats the original HeadMaster, he says, so he’s holding on to the few HeadMasters he has left. “The people who make parts for it stopped making parts. So they don’t manufacture the thing anymore. And when it goes away, when mine die, I don’t know what I’ll do…it will be horrible.”

  26

  A Changing of the Guard

  Bitzer’s dream of a million terminals had become a dream deferred. Nineteen eighty, the time frame Bitzer first aimed at to reach the million-terminal mark, passed by in a blur, like a road sign glimpsed in a rearview mirror. Nineteen eighty-five, the next milestone, was in clear sight, but not the million terminals. There were sixty thousand employees working for CDC in 1984, the year that revenue reached $5 billion. In both cases, those numbers turned out to be peaks never to be attained again (by 1989 the company would only have seventeen thousand employees). Some of CDC’s initiatives with PLATO were modestly profitable, but just as many were not. CERL and CDC had decoupled from their long-held code-sharing relationship, and were going their separate ways. UI authors were unhappy with not only the royalty rates they were earning from CDC publishing their lessons, but also the fact that the company decided to compete with those authors by developing its own courseware. “They never seemed to learn that lesson,” says Bitzer. “They should have just taken our courseware directly. They had a license for all of the lessons. [It] would have worked out better than the way it was done. We had a much better remedial program for adult education than CDC had. In my opinion, they produced an inferior program at a very high cost because they had an organization that needed the work. They made an authoring deal with a professor from Penn State. His agreement produced more royalties than the sum of all the royalties for the UI authors. That didn’t go over very well with the UI authors.”

  In addition, despite continued rosy statements from Norris (who in 1984 predicted that by 1994, PLATO would be bringing in $1 billion annually from the public schools alone), the world was growing increasingly skeptical that CDC was going to survive, let alone thrive, particularly due to PLATO.

  “CDC’s relationship with us by the late 1970s reached a point of benign neglect,” says Bitzer. “CDC did their own thing, and we were doing ours….We also helped create the state of benign neglect.” The dream of a million terminals was still alive, but it was becoming questionable whether CERL would be running CDC equipment. Since the early 1980s CDC had been teaming up with other companies, including Texas Instruments and Atari, to develop software that would enable PLATO courseware to run on microcomputers from companies like those, but the market reception was weak. CDC partnered with competitor WICAT (World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching), forming a joint venture called “PLATO/WICAT” that attempted to chase the K–12 school market, but the market showed little interest. Meanwhile CERL was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just to maintain its aging CYBER hardware. On top of this, CDC decided to invest heavily in developing a 64-bit processor mainframe—only to discover how completely incompatible with PLATO it was and then deciding not to convert PLATO to 64-bit. That was the signal to some observers that PLATO’s future at CDC—at least at the mainframe level—was dead.

  All of these factors were swirling at CERL and CDC. For CERL, it was becoming clear, thanks to Moore’s Law, that with the cost of components dropping fast and the power of those components rising just as fast, it was soon going to be cheaper to find an alternative, non-CDC solution to running PLATO at Illinois. “I think they’ve realized,” Bitzer would say in 1986, “that they’ve kind of dropped the ball….And my guess is that they’re going to go more into the cluster and standalones and look forward to us taking over the big central portion.” Bitzer, on the other hand, was still firmly holding on to the ball. Problem was, the harder he held on, the more the ball lost air.

  That “big central portion” Bitzer spoke of had a name, at least in the hallways and notesfiles of CERL: “Colossal PLATO.” It was never clear whether the appellation was chosen to describe the project’s ambitious scale or its folly in the face of a networked, microcomputer-dominated future. “That’s a no-no name,” said Tebby Lyman of the term in 1986. “There was an evolution within CERL itself,” says Frank Propst. “PLATO began to be labeled a ‘dinosaur’ within our own staff.” Beyond many of the key junior contributors, students like David Frankel, John Matheny, Phil and Kim Mast, Ray Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen, Len Kawell, Al Harkrader, and countless others, numerous senior people had left as well: Paul Tenczar, Bob Rader, Bruce and Judy Sherwood, Ruth Chabay, Dave Andersen.

  Nevertheless, work began on the next generation of PLATO. Don Lee, one of CERL’s longest-serving software geniuses, and an up-and-coming, stellar electrical engineer, Lippold Haken, were enlisted to design and build a custom mainframe, one that would free CERL from CDC and set it on its own way.

  But there was another twist. Bitzer had decided that the future of PLATO at CERL was one that not only did not involve CDC hardware, but also in important ways would not involve CERL. He decided to start a company, called University Communications, Inc. (UCI). UCI would distribute service via satellite to send display information down to the terminals, and continue using phone lines to gather up a classroom’s worth of simultaneous user input, and return it by a single phone line back to the central system. Bitzer’s goal was to reduce the cost, which would have continued to be prohibitively expensive if he sent all the users’ display information down to the terminals via phone lines. It was a kludgy approach but apropos of the PLATO tradition. By going the satellite route, Bitzer was forced to relax the strict tradition of the Fast Round Trip to accommodate many thousands of terminals connecting via cheap satellite connections (the laws of physics dictate that if you send a signal up to a geosynchronous-orbiting satellite and the satellite sends it back down immediately, that trip alone even at the speed of light still takes 240 milliseconds). UCI contracted with a company in Arizona called Compu-Sat to provide the satellite services.

  Meanwhile Control Data grew frustrated at CERL’s continued use of the term “PLATO,” a trademark that the University of Illinois had sold to CDC as part of the 1976 deal. It was one thing for CERL to offer services under the PLATO moniker to educational and government-run organizations, but now it was morphing into something that was to be sold commercially by a for-profit company. CDC’s lawyers sent repeated reminders to drop the name and use something else. Eventually it was decided that the new system, marketed by UCI, would be called “NovaNET.”

  UCI had three stated goals: 1) dramatically reduce the per-terminal cost of the service; 2) maintain or even improve the system’s performance for each user; and 3) get to very large scale. Only now, the “very large scale” was no longer a million terminals. Bitzer’s new number was 400,000. There was little mention of noneducational, commercial services like he had discussed back in 1975 at the conference in Virginia. NovaNET was a continuation of the pure, original PLATO vision going back to 1960.

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  Lippold Haken had been hanging around CERL since he was a young student at Uni High, taking a Latin class on PLATO III in 1971. During his teenage years he tinkered with a Gooch synthesizer box, and wound up writing one of the earliest computer-generated musical notation printing programs. On at least one of Bitzer’s dog-and-pony PLATO trips in the 1970s, Haken tagged along, and during the demo his job was to sit on a basketball to provide sufficient air pressure for the PLATO IV terminal’s pneumatic microfiche slide projector. “During the whole demonstration I’d sit on t
he basketball, and as they showed more and more slides the thing would deflate more and more,” says Haken. By the mid-1980s, Haken had undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical and computer engineering (he got his PhD under Don Bitzer), and had become a UI professor.

  “Just because I had experience doing some hardware,” he says, “I was drafted into this project to help build this computer which Don Lee had sketched out. When asked point-blank is this possible to build, I couldn’t say no, on the other hand I knew it was a pretty crazy project to undertake to build your own mainframe computer.”

  Bitzer had searched for an existing product, but found no available computer with sufficient processor speed and memory capacity that would be cheaper than what he calculated it would cost to build on their own. Lee and Haken selected off-the-shelf components, used software to design the interconnections of chips and wiring, and got to work. The goal was to build a machine that was essentially a clone of a CYBER computer, designed to run existing TUTOR lessons unmodified but approximately ten times faster than any CYBER, and with a lot more memory. Haken named the machine the ‘Zephyr’ after once riding Amtrak’s Chicago-to-San-Francisco rail line with the same name. “Basically it was cheap. It cost a million bucks to build a computer.” People like Don Lee had real salaries, he says, “but a lot of it was slave labor.” The machine was largely paid for from service charges to the many departments and institutions that had terminals connected to CERL’s system.

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  The UCI business posed difficult questions for the University of Illinois. Ten years earlier, Bitzer had pioneered a major technology transfer from an academic institution to a commercial business when it licensed PLATO to CDC. Now he was presenting another pioneering scenario to the university: he would once again take technology created at CERL and transfer it to a for-profit business to commercialize it and scale it far bigger than was possible or appropriate in a university setting. But this time the issues were even more thorny: he proposed to run this new for-profit company himself as its CEO while continuing to be director of CERL, at least for the first few years. He also wished to raise venture capital for the UCI start-up. The potential for conflicts of interest was high. As early as 1984 he was having meetings and exchanging memoranda with members of the UI administration, presenting a variety of scenarios to the university to find one that would be acceptable to them so he could proceed.