The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Not only had Rustad’s hack enabled him to sit back and capture everyone’s passwords, including authors, but he had a brilliant stroke of luck right at the outset. “Within fifteen minutes of running this program,” he says, “I had captured the high-chief password.” This was a super-secret password used only by the systems staff to do privileged things with the system. It didn’t take long for Springfield students to find out what Rustad had done, and word eventually got back to CERL. “It was a little trouble,” Rustad says, “but they were pretty cool about it. They just asked me to never simulate a system display again. I didn’t.”

  Of course, that didn’t mean he didn’t hack the system again in other ways. He set right to work creating another program. “The next version of my program was able to capture keys from the system input buffer when people were entering their passwords,” he says, and this time he didn’t have to fake the PLATO welcome page. Instead he essentially wiretapped PLATO III, recording all of the keyboard traffic from any terminal he liked. “I was able to get the high-chief password once more.”

  One day, Don Bitzer received a letter from a student at Springfield. “ ‘Dear Doctor Bitzer,’ ” Bitzer remembers it saying. “ ‘Maybe you’d like to know the passwords to everyone on your system.’ And there they were.” Bitzer was impressed that the Springfield kids didn’t do any damage, but instead had reported the security weakness to the “high chief” of PLATO himself.

  Rustad’s hacks revealed gaping holes in the way programs ran on PLATO. Unless CERL modified the system it was inevitable that some other jokester would come along and pull the same trick on unsuspecting users. For the PLATO IV system, now under way, CERL decided to modify the login process so that users would have to press a new key combination called SHIFT-STOP (hold down the SHIFT and press STOP) in order to proceed. SHIFT-STOP was treated as a special key sequence that would exit you out of any program and was, in theory, the guaranteed way that one could be sure one was not in a fake system program. A similar idea would appear years later at Microsoft when they introduced what would become known across the world as the “three-finger salute”: Control-Alt-Del.

  “I didn’t invent SHIFT-STOP,” says Rustad, “but I was the reason for it.”

  —

  It was one thing to be drawn to a single computer terminal in the corner of a second-floor classroom at Springfield High School. But eventually, if you tinkered with it and the system it was connected to long enough, you’d get hungry for more. And the only way to satiate that hunger was to make the pilgrimage: to hit the road, to head east, to the building where the real action was taking place. CERL.

  Doug Brown and Dave Kopf, relative old-timers who graduated high school in 1970, made pilgrimages, just to see what was going on and to meet the people like Blomme they’d interacted with via makeshift online chats and primitive emails on PLATO III. “I was very interested in electronics and computers,” says Brown, “so going there was very exciting, seeing all this stuff, all the equipment, the racks of stuff.”

  It may have been on the first trip or one of the early subsequent ones, Brown no longer remembers, but in their excitement to get to CERL and see the place, they hadn’t thought the logistics of their trip fully through. “We came and visited during the day….I don’t know how we were getting back home, we hadn’t made any provisions for at night, I guess we had just assumed that everybody would be there all night. And, everybody left, and so we tried to go over to Illini Union,” which has hotel facilities, but there were no vacancies. “And then we went back to PLATO and we went up to the fourth floor and the room where the PLATO IV computer, the 6400, was going to be was empty, and we slept on the floor up there for a small number of hours.” On some weekend trips, they often slept in Blomme’s office. “This was a crazy time,” Blomme says.

  Later, Rustad made the pilgrimage as well. CERL, to its credit, didn’t chase them away. It welcomed and encouraged them. It redirected their energy and technical curiosity away from simple hacks and shenanigans into productive work on the system. “You didn’t have to be an employee to do great work,” says Bill Golden, “you didn’t have to be a college student, you certainly didn’t have to be a PhD—that was probably a detriment, if you were a PhD. All you had to do was something that one of the people in power—didn’t have to be Bitzer—but one of the people in authority said, ‘That’s clever,’ and you were in.”

  While aging and growing obsolete by the month, PLATO III was still in production and needed help, and the huge PLATO IV project was also under way. CERL could use as many bright minds as they could find, especially with system software. It didn’t hurt that these bright teenagers didn’t require much pay.

  Brown entered the University of Illinois as a freshman in the fall of 1970—and also landed a job at CERL as a programmer. Kopf wound up programming there as well. As did Rustad. “I spent the summer [of 1971] working as a system programmer on PLATO III,” says Rustad. “I was kind of a caretaker while most of the staff focused on getting PLATO IV going.” It may have not been leading-edge work, but for a high school sophomore, the memory lasted a lifetime. Decades later, Rustad would say of that summer job, “That was probably one of the most important training experiences of my life. I really learned a great deal.”

  CERL caught on quickly that the Springfield kids were good hackers, and if you wanted to test your system security, letting the Springfield kids loose on the system was the way to go. As the trips to CERL increased, says Rustad, “the staff made security a bit of a game. We were supposed to break in and then tell them how we did it. On one visit, we sent one of our group up to the fourth floor to announce our arrival. While that was happening, the rest of us started hacking. The fellow that had gone up to fourth floor came back saying that they were just going to give us signons because we wouldn’t be able to break in. That proved to be wrong. We had already broken in and run batch jobs to put blinking messages on the console announcing our arrival. They had simply forgotten a back door into the old edit logic.”

  —

  Other Springfield High kids followed in Brown’s and Rustad’s footsteps. Steve Freyder, Dave Fuller, and Marshall Midden were all a year behind Brown, and when Brown graduated, those three continued the fine tradition of PLATO troublemaking and mischief out at Springfield. “I was one of those attention-deficit kids that wants to get into everything,” says Fuller, “and saw this computer and said, Shit, this is for me.” Brown had already embarked on pilgrimages to CERL in the past, and that tradition continued, except for Fuller. “There was a bunch that would go to Champaign-Urbana for weekends,” he says. “Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me.” Eventually he was able to travel over and hang out in the Power House, and like so many before him, was given Rick Blomme’s now-famous series of computer programming problems. “It was Rick’s idea that efficiency is good, and so I pretty much solved them and I kind of went from there. I entered the University of Illinois in 1973, and basically never managed to make a degree there, because I was spending too damn much time on the system.”

  Word got out that Rick Blomme would help, but only “if you approached him correctly,” says Dave Fuller. “If you just wandered in, he was adverse to small talk.”

  But if you had a good question…

  “It’s like approaching any oracle,” Fuller says. “Just don’t go there with your mind disorganized. Say, look, I have this problem, I want to solve it….One of the funny stories was, he used to practice piano in his apartment. He used to keep a log of how many bars of piano he practiced that day. Very organized.”

  —

  Two other high schools served as feeders for the new wave of PLATO kids: Urbana High School and Uni High. Uni High had a particular advantage in this context. It was practically across the street.

  “Uni High is an enormous influence on the University of Illinois,” says Bill Golden. While it had the reputation for being unstructured, unusual, experimental, compared to the conventional regimen and curricu
lum of a typical American public high school, Golden says it was in fact quite structured. “Uni High is a five-year high school,” he says. “It takes students in as what are called sub-freshmen, they would normally be seventh graders, through twelve. And they should have six years to graduate but they do it in five. The curriculum is very, very structured. There are English classes, and social studies classes, and language classes, math classes, and they’re all very rigorous. They’re conducted at the college level, basically.” About fifty students are taken in each year—after passing a tough entrance exam. The total student body numbered between 225 to 250. Uni High students were bright to begin with, but came out brighter. Many became professors. They went off to the best colleges in the world. “In about 1956 I think it was, Max Beberman gave a lecture at Harvard,” says Golden. “And in attendance was the president of Harvard, Conant. Anyway, at the end there was a reception as usual, and the president of Harvard comes, and says, ‘You’re from the University of Illinois, where is that?’ And Beberman says, ‘It’s in Urbana, in the middle of the state.’ And he says, ‘Oh, Urbana! That’s where that high school is. Keep sending us these wonderful students.’ And Beberman says, ‘Yes, that’s where I work, it’s my school.’ So Uni High was known by the president of Harvard, when the University of Illinois was just, ‘Yeah, there must be one.’ ”

  Uni High students were treated as if they were adults, says Golden. “I’d say it’s run as though it were a college, based on the responsibility given to students….Unlike most high schools, you must attend classes but the rest of the time is yours, and they have a wonderful library. It’s a great school. It’s where you want to send your kid if you can. And so it’s natural that those with a scientific bent would be lured, where else were you going to play with expensive computers in the 1960s, when you were sixteen years old? Fifteen years old?”

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a few of Uni High students, including Sherwin Gooch, brothers Phil and Kim Mast, Rich Goldhor, Dave Woolley, and David Frankel, wound up working in one capacity or another at CERL, drawn by the many technological wonders within, plus a welcoming attitude among the staff, as long as you stayed out of trouble. CERL’s proximity to Uni High was one of those great fortuitous accidents that wound up benefiting both institutions for years. “Why did the Uni student cross the road?” went the old joke. “To get to CERL.”

  Woolley’s first exposure to PLATO was around 1969, when his Uni High class was tasked with taking a geometry lesson on PLATO III. While the black-and-white TV graphics were crude, and the teletype keyboard required students to clumsily replace some of the keycaps with specially labeled ones designed just for their specific lessons, the interaction and quality of the geometry instruction were intriguing enough for Woolley to want to find out more.

  Woolley and Kim Mast would get more exposure to PLATO from Mast’s older brother Phil. He had already gotten a job as a junior systems programmer working on PLATO III at CERL, and he let the two try out the system when it wasn’t being used by an actual class. Both kept coming back. While still in their senior year at Uni High, they managed to get paying jobs at CERL, creating utilities and simple programs and whatever projects were assigned to them.

  —

  David Frankel’s story is worth a mention here. In 1972 he was twelve years old, and wandered over to the CERL building from Uni High where he was in school. “It just seemed to be a regular university building at that time,” he says, “it was open, unlocked, and one could wander the halls, and there was all this computer gear in there. And so I started to just make myself at home, and started to experiment with things that were there. It was a laboratory environment and although there were some specific classrooms that were used specifically for formal teaching classes, there were also other rooms, and again not knowing better I just made myself at home, started to experiment.”

  To Frankel’s surprise, rather than being kicked out, people in CERL were enthusiastic, interested, and helpful. According to Frankel, the initial interactions would go along these lines:

  David Frankel in the news Credit 29

  CERL PERSON: What are you doing here?

  FRANKEL: Oh, you know, well, it’s neat.

  CERL PERSON: It is, isn’t it? Here, you want to try this, you want to try that?

  “I remember Rick Blomme gave me some programming problems,” Frankel says. Blomme kept encouraging Frankel, and Frankel kept coming back, having made CERL his new hangout, an hour or so each day after (or during) school. Frankel’s insatiable curiosity made him absorb everything he laid eyes on: tips, techniques, know-how, even what others were doing. He became a gadfly, to many a brat, to some Bitzer’s pet. Even so, people could recognize how smart he was. If he couldn’t find out something on the computer, he’d rummage through the trash, looking at printouts and memos and whatever else was in there; that led to more clues and hints about how PLATO worked and what else he might do on the system. He was a mouse running loose through the four floors of CERL, a hungry gremlin determined to know everything he could about the system. Soon he discovered that some PLATO files were password protected. Hacker kid that he was, the fact that the passwords were kept secret drove him crazy. But then he discovered he didn’t need to know them. “It became apparent,” he says, “that there was a master password that overwrote all the other passwords. So for quite a while, many months, I think, it became my quest to find out what the master password was.” Frankel and the systems staff fell into a cycle: he would discover the master password, they would change it; repeat. Then they changed the mechanism by which the password was stored, only to have Frankel figure that out. Repeat. “I learned a whole lot through that process,” he says. So did CERL.

  Frankel had found a way to be of use. He was a pest, but a useful one, breaking PLATO IV’s weak security over and over, even when it had been strengthened. His rummaging through trash bins paid off, for that was where he found the master password, hard-coded right in the middle of the code to an editing program. The one dumb thing a programmer is never supposed to do, and they had gone and done it—put the master password, the One Password That Ruled Them All, right in the code, plain as day, for anyone to read. One of the master passwords was “infinity,” and another was “mausoleum.” Neither survived long with Frankel on the scene.

  “For me the whole deal there was just learning how conducive the place was to learning. As I would discover these things, people never got mad at me, and I don’t think I ever did anything particularly malicious. These were just sort of intellectual challenges and the staff there always sort of looked at it as, ‘Okay, that’s great, now we’ll move on to the next challenge.’ It was fantastic. I started in ’72, spending time there, and much of my time was just sort of learning and amusing myself and then I started trying to do more useful things, and I had a couple of projects for various people that were brought to my attention somehow and of course I started to flirt with the idea that one could actually get a job.”

  One tiny problem with getting a job at CERL was that he was twelve years old. In a normal university department, or any business around town for that matter, except maybe delivering papers on a bicycle for the local newspaper, that would have been the end of the story. But this was CERL, a lab run by Bitzer. Bitzer loved the fact that a bright twelve-year-old kid from Uni High just would not go away but kept finding ways of being useful. Bitzer gave him a job. He just couldn’t, by law, pay him, due to Illinois’ child labor laws. Such administrivia meant nothing to Bitzer. Frankel was in. “I would make deals as I worked on projects for various parties,” Frankel says. “I made various deals for different things. I remember I got a ski jacket for some work, I got an electric typewriter—there was no such thing as word processors at the time. I’d make deals for all sorts of things. But then when I turned fourteen I made $2.31 an hour.” That was December 1973, and CERL held a party to celebrate Frankel’s being old enough to be paid—as a systems programmer on the technical staff.
r />   —

  Urbana High School—the home of the local JETS chapter—continued to be another source of enthusiastic kids eager to learn more and start hacking on PLATO. For tech-curious kids, having so many PLATO IV terminals being installed in CERL and other campus buildings was nirvana. “Hell,” says Doug Green, who attended Urbana High, “the administrators had no clue whether we were supposed to be there or weren’t supposed to be there, or allowed or not allowed, professor’s kid, whose professor’s kid, or just some rug rat off the street, you know, there was just no way to discriminate between who was who. And we all knew each other.”

  Perhaps what Bitzer saw in these kids was a bit of himself. “In a way he was like a big kid,” says Nancy Risser, who worked at CERL in the 1960s and 1970s. “He loved sharing the excitement, he loved sharing the ideas….He had no need to be secret, he had a much bigger need to share ideas and work with other people and have fun with it. And bringing kids in was consistent with that.”