The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Under orders from the university, the CERL technicians gathered up hundreds of terminals—including nearly all of the PLATO IV and PLATO V machines with their plasma displays—and had them destroyed. “I tore many of them up as part of my job,” recalls Jim Payne. A tiny number of terminals survive to this day—some are now in museums—and the plasma panels, now over forty years old, still work perfectly, their orange glow as bright as ever.

  The Power House, home to so many innovations over the decades, first from CSL and then from CERL, would soon be taken over by the neighboring mechanical engineering department. The fourth-floor machine room, home of the CYBER hardware for years, was emptied, the Zephyr and other equipment—including the now ancient and yellowing tiles that comprised the raised floor of the computer room—moved to a commercial space in downtown Champaign. UCI, perhaps in attempt to put an unpleasant past behind it, renamed itself NovaNET Learning, Inc., and retired the Zephyr after acquiring a remarkably small, affordable DEC Alpha computer and creating a complete emulation environment of a CYBER machine, with PLATO happily running as a job in the operating system.

  CERL’s old fourth-floor machine room became a lab for mechanical engineering students to study washing machines.

  The Propsts’ various lawsuits were consolidated and dragged on through the courts all the way to the Supreme Court in 1995, which denied hearing their cases, finally putting an end to a long, ugly chapter in the history of the university.

  Bitzer was by then thriving at North Carolina State University, busy teaching a number of courses, earning rave reviews from students, as well as taking on a flock of bright, eager, graduate students. By 2003 he had developed an explanation for why he left CERL and Illinois: he had always loved working at CERL because only 5 percent of his time was spent with paperwork and administration, and the rest of the time he could have fun, do experiments, and actually build things. But then in the 1980s, it became 90 percent paperwork, lawsuits, and fighting the administration. And it was “no longer fun,” he says. “North Carolina is fun.” As of 2017, at eighty-three he is still teaching there, and has never stopped talking about the wonders of PLATO and NovaNET.

  27

  Leaving the Nest

  One unfortunate but usually inevitable consequence of an academic lab like CERL was the transient nature of the community. Particularly the high schoolers and undergraduates, who would not remain in school forever. Most of them grew up and left, taking on newer, different career opportunities elsewhere. Some stayed in town, or at CERL, for long stints, but most were gone as soon as they got a degree. With ever-more-powerful microcomputers and the rise of online services like the Source, CompuServe, the WELL, and, later on, AOL and Prodigy, not to mention thousands of dial-up bulletin board systems, and of course the growing Internet, there were now copious alternatives to PLATO. There was also an increasing variety of ways to bring PLATO ideas and ways of thinking, the system’s features, lessons, notesfiles, and games, to these alternative platforms.

  Within CDC, hardware engineers like Jock Hill had tried to bring a microcomputing sensibility to the PLATO effort, but the corporate inertia stymied many of the chances CDC had for an early start on the competition. Likewise, many individual contributors, experienced with PLATO at CERL and CDC—people who fully appreciated the power of the communication and collaboration features of the system—began to see that there was nothing about these features unique to PLATO anymore. These kinds of tools were going to flourish in the future on other systems, whether there was a connection to PLATO or not.

  Likewise, PLATO’s head start on multiplayer games and game design in general was not something that could or would only exist on PLATO. These ideas were compelling, and it was inevitable that they would escape from the increasingly rarefied ecosystem of PLATO to find homes out in the heterogeneous world of networked computing.

  The world was catching up to PLATO. What follows are stories of just a few PLATO people who moved on into microcomputers and the Internet, taking ideas that were commonplace on PLATO and bringing them to the world.

  Brand Fortner, Bruce Artwick

  Brand Fortner’s popular Airfight game was remarkable in its time for its depiction of the physics of flight and three-dimensional view out the window of the cockpit. (It was certainly slow as molasses to replot the screen, but no one cared. The Fast Round Trip made the game incredibly thrilling anyway.) Fortner decided later to build a more formal flight simulator, called AirSim, which lacked the air combat arcade action, instead focusing on a more accurate, realistic simulation of flight in a number of different aircraft, chosen from a menu.

  While Fortner was working on Airfight, UI’s Aviation Research Lab was experimenting to create higher-quality real-time flight simulation graphics using parts cannibalized from a PLATO IV terminal, including its plasma display, which they hooked up to a more powerful PDP-11 computer. One of the students working on this other project was Bruce Artwick, who made it his master’s thesis. After graduation he moved to Los Angeles to work at Hughes Aircraft but got the idea to revisit flight simulations using a microcomputer. He created such a game on an Apple II, formed a tiny company called subLOGIC to sell the game, and found insatiable market demand for it. In time he would develop more sophisticated versions for the IBM PC, which were licensed to Microsoft as the Microsoft Flight Simulator, one of the most popular PC games of the 1980s and 1990s.

  Artwick once observed that his experience was the direct opposite of Fortner’s: Artwick approached the flight world first by seeing simulators as training aviators, and only later did he get the idea to develop a game version. Fortner started with a game and then later built a flight simulator.

  Silas Warner

  Silas Warner, who while at Indiana University during the first half of the 1970s contributed to Empire early on and then created a number of other popular, innovative PLATO games, including Robotwar, eventually got a job at Commercial Credit in Baltimore, working on PLATO. He eventually joined Muse Software, a tiny game publisher based in Baltimore, as employee number one. There, he developed a variety of programs for the Apple II that did not sell very well, as well as a version of Robotwar, and his most famous and consequential game, Castle Wolfenstein. Like Mark Johnson’s Drygulch, Warner took the dungeons and dragons game motif and placed it in a new, exciting context, in this case, a Nazi-controlled castle during World War II. Wolfenstein resembled the old PLATO game Dnd, in that it provided a top-down viewpoint of the dungeon mazes and rooms. Remarkable for its time was support for primitive audio clips associated with game action, including soldiers yelling to the player. Warner’s game was hugely popular for a number of years, spawning in 1984 a sequel, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, which Warner also developed. By the early 1990s, another company, id Software, independently brought the Nazi castle motif back with vastly improved technology. Wolfenstein 3D was a wildly popular first-person shooter game that in turn would lead to id Software’s DOOM and increasingly photorealistic first-person shooter games right up until today.

  Paul Alfille, Jim Horne

  Jim Horne grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, and attended the University of Alberta, graduating in 1980 with a BS in physics. He stuck around the campus afterward, eventually getting a job at the university’s PLATO project, developing CBE courseware, some with interactive videodisc players controlled by the PLATO terminal. Horne played the various PLATO games, finding the action-oriented ones like Avatar, Moria, Airfight, and Empire less compelling than pure logic games, including one, Freecell, written by Paul Alfille in 1978 on the CERL system.

  Alfille and fellow medical students at the time, Mike Gorback and David Tanaka, had also unleashed a brilliant game onto PLATO called BND (Bugs ’N Drugs), which like Drygulch, took the dungeons and dragons motif and applied it to another setting, in this case, a hospital. As you walked the corridors of the hospital, you would encounter “monsters,” but in BND they were bacteria or germs, and your “weapons” to fight them were various antibiotic
s. Choose the right antibiotic and you might defeat the monster; the wrong one and, well, things went downhill fast.

  Alfille’s Freecell was a single-player solitaire-like card game designed as a mental puzzler, where a player moves cards around the screen based on elaborate rules. Like most games on CERL, it featured a hall of fame, which only encouraged users to keep at it for far too long. The game was designed to be eminently winnable, though tricky: yet another combination that lured players in and kept them going for hours. Unlike CPU hogs like Empire and Airfight, in Freecell the vast majority of the time the player was simply sitting staring at the screen, figuring out what move to make next—a setting that was quite kind to the central processor.

  By the early 1980s the game had been published by Control Data and was available on all PLATO systems, which is how Jim Horne discovered the game on the Alberta system. “I thought it was a fantastic game,” he says. “It’s the kind of game, man I wish I could invent something like this, because there’s no luck involved after the original draw, after the original shuffle, and most games seem to be winnable. It intrigued me very much about whether all games could be winnable. And I wasted way too much time playing it.”

  He liked the game so much he decided to copy it to the IBM PC, writing a version that ran in DOS but took advantage of the color and primitive but built-in special characters for hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades. “So I had everything I needed to be able to write a Freecell game.” He created a little company, Frog and Peach Software, Inc., and in 1988 released the game as shareware on bulletin board systems and CompuServe, where in time a large audience of fans enjoyed it. He asked players for a donation of $10. That same year he applied for a job at Microsoft and joined the company, working on the team building Microsoft LAN Manager. “For years after that,” he says, “people would send checks for $10 to my home address in Canada, where I used to live even when I had moved to Redmond to work for Microsoft.”

  During the time that Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and 3.1 between 1990 and 1992, most gamers still preferred the faster DOS environment for game playing and refused to use Windows because it was too slow. Bill Gates saw this and decided that Microsoft should make some games of its own to increase acceptance of Windows across this important user constituency. “He didn’t want to start a whole project to do it,” says Horne, “so he sent out mail to the developers of Microsoft saying, We’re going to build these things called Windows Entertainment Packs. We’re not going to pay you for this, but if you’ve got a game you’ve written in your spare time, we’ll collect, like, the best eight of them or something like that, and throw them into this Windows Entertainment Pack which would ship on a single 5¼ floppy, basically designed to be copied and given to your friends’—there was no copy protection at the time….But it was just to try to generate enthusiasm for games.” A new, graphical version of Freecell was one of the games chosen to be included. Beginning with the release of Windows NT, Freecell was included with every subsequent version of Windows, including the gigantically successful Windows 95. Millions of people discovered and became addicted to Freecell.

  The deal Gates struck with the lucky few employees whose games were selected for the original package was that he would grant each of them ten shares of Microsoft stock. “Which if I’d kept,” says Horne, “it’d be worth a bunch of money now.” Instead, at some point he sold it, buying a pair of high-end stereo speakers worth over $10,000. Windows had “telemetry” in the operating system that informed Microsoft of some rough usage statistics for what people were using on their PC. Horne discovered that Solitaire was one of the top three programs, and Freecell was around number seven, ahead of Word and Excel.

  Before the game was published by Microsoft, the company required it to be declared free of any copyright, patent, or other intellectual property rights entanglements. “I had to make sure there was prior art—descriptions of very similar games, in books that predated by decades the PLATO version.” That was enough for Microsoft, and they gave him the green light. In all the years of Freecell’s success on the PC, Horne never called, wrote, emailed, or otherwise contacted Paul Alfille, nor did he ever include any sort of acknowledgment to Alfille’s work in the game itself. Later, when Alfille, who finished medical school and became an anesthesiologist, learned of the existence of Microsoft Freecell, he was dismayed and shocked. “I assigned rights to U of I Board of Trustees or whatever we were required to do. When I saw the Microsoft version a few years later, I contacted the U of I, but they had no information or interest in pursuing the matter.”

  To this day, the two have never met, spoken to each other, or even corresponded. “I should probably send him a note,” says Horne, “and thank him helping make me famous.”

  Robert Woodhead, Andrew Greenberg

  Cornell University leased a couple of PLATO IV terminals from CERL in the 1970s, but never expanded beyond them in the way sites like Delaware did. Very few students were exposed to the system, though, not surprisingly, some of the ones who found PLATO so compelling and addictive would make pilgrimages out to CERL to see the home of the Orange Glow for themselves. Two such students were Robert Woodhead and Andrew Greenberg. Woodhead was an active, outspoken, and controversial participant in the CERL notesfile community. “Apparently I annoyed enough people to get a notesfile dedicated to my latest absurdities,” says Woodhead. The notesfile was called =balsanotes=, in honor of the nickname everyone chose for Woodhead: “Balsa Brain.” “One of the things I learned from the social interaction on PLATO—apart from learning how to be a merely obnoxious jerk as opposed to a totally obnoxious one—was not to take myself too seriously.”

  Greenberg and Woodhead were gaming addicts, playing Avatar, Empire, and Oubliette. “I’d been thrown out of college for a year—too much PLATO, not enough studying—and decided to try selling software,” says Woodhead. “The PLATO games showed that cool games could be done on computers, so for me the question was, could I do as cool a game on the tiny PCs, in particular when the game would have to be a one-person one? I started work on a game called Paladin for the Apple II, and shortly thereafter by chance discovered that Andy had written a similar game for the Apple in BASIC called Wizardry. We put our heads together and decided to team up to rewrite Wizardry in Pascal and expand it considerably. Andy did most of the design, and I did most of the coding.” While working on Wizardry, Woodhead says he was spending around $1,000 monthly to dial up directly to Minnesota to play Empire. “This was my relaxation while developing the Wizardry games,” he says.

  Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord shipped in 1981 from a tiny software publisher called Sir-Tech Software, Inc. The game features a Mad Overlord named Trebor (Woodhead’s first name backwards) and an evil wizard named Werdna (Greenberg’s first name backwards) and eerily resembled aspects of PLATO’s MUDs. In 1982 a sequel, Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds, followed with a half-dozen additional sequels coming out at regular intervals through 2001. The series was a huge hit, selling millions of copies. The games’ designs influenced many other games for years afterward.

  Many in the PLATO community were not happy, arguing—some going to great lengths to gather what they considered smoking-gun evidence—that Wizardry was a rip-off of PLATO MUDs, in particular Oubliette. Says Woodhead, “I’ve run into a few people who feel that way, but I think our true crime was that, often despite our best efforts, we ended up making money on it. We just wrote the game because we wanted to do something cool, and we hoped we might make enough money to pay back the time investment. We were stunned by how successful it was.” He also argues that the Apple II being a standalone personal computer meant that Wizardry had to be a single-user game, which required rethinking many aspects of multiuser dungeon game designs that had become second nature on PLATO.

  What Wizardry represented, Woodhead believes, was the continuation of a natural progression of ideas that had already been going on for years on PLATO: Pedit5 leading to Dnd leading to Moria and O
ubliette, leading to Avatar. “I’m proud of what I was able to do,” he says, “but at the same time I am happy to acknowledge the influence of PLATO in the conception of Wizardry, and do so often.”

  Paul Tenczar, Ron Klass

  During the 1970s Paul Tenczar, the creator of TUTOR and one of the senior systems software managers at CERL, became increasingly convinced that the mainframe vision for PLATO was no longer viable. Perhaps some of the ideas he’d been exposed to on his trip to Xerox PARC had sunk in. But it took a while. “At first he was extremely negative,” recalls Dave Andersen, a CERL systems staffer, regarding Tenczar’s reaction to the rise of microcomputers, “and then he didn’t talk about it for a while, then he did his own company.” Tenczar’s change of tune came about as he saw the inevitable, inescapable rise of microcomputers as the new direction to pursue. Once he became a convert, he still met resistance from people like Bitzer and Propst.

  “When micros came out,” says Tenczar, “all the empowered courses, all the computer science departments, all the major companies completely missed the microprocessor revolution. Some of us, Stan Smith was one, and then myself, began looking at the Apple II. I actually did homework, and I looked at that and realized that that has about ten times the processing power of a PLATO terminal—this was in ’77, when the Apple II came out.” He tried to drum up interest in the Apple II but, he says, “people thought I was nuts.” After having a falling out with Bitzer and members of the senior staff, he founded, with some partners, a company called Regency Systems, designed to bring PLATO’s CBE capabilities to a PC platform. “We had the first standalone authoring system in the world,” Tenczar says. “It took people four or five years at PLATO to realize that the micros were the way to go.”