The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

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  Nineteen seventy-three and 1974 were the boom years for Big Board games. They were easy to write, instantly popular, and as the code to run a Big Board game became standardized and shared like a plug-in component, akin to open-source software routines today, it made it even easier to get a new game up and running. But already, ideas were percolating among the new wave of kids. It was starting to dawn on some of these kids that there was more that could be done with the TUTOR language than just writing simple Big Board games pitting one player against another.

  A lot more.

  14

  The Killer App

  By the time America Online expanded to millions of users in the 1990s, it had become abundantly clear to keen observers that something had changed with computing. Applications like word processing, spreadsheets, and databases, along with desktop publishing and graphics tools, had transformed computing from a primarily number-crunching business of the 1970s to a thriving industry in the 1980s built around the rise of the personal computer. But as those personal computers became networked in the 1980s in workplaces, and then widely over phone lines and the Internet in the 1990s, mainstream society would finally realize that computers had become inter-personal. The PLATO community had already understood the phenomenon years before, as had the makers of telegraphs and telephones decades earlier.

  Silicon Valley had a term for it: “killer application.” The main reason people now used computers and digital devices and could not imagine life without them was not their love for a spreadsheet, or a word processing program, or any sort of productivity tool. The killer app that drew people in and got them hooked was communication, connection, belonging. Computers let people yak. A lot and all the time. Email, chat rooms, instant messaging, SMS: all people seemed to do was yak. The vaunted, long-heralded Information Age might better be described as an Opinion Age: everyone had an opinion on everything, and the computer was the new tool to share those opinions widely, whether they were informed, fact-based, or not.

  The killer app made its appearance on PLATO almost as soon as the PLATO IV system began its rollout in 1972 at Illinois, which suggests that it wasn’t that PLATO itself, or its creators, dreamed up the killer app, but, rather, it’s something that just happens if and when the right ingredients are in place. Perhaps it was inevitable: the two-user PLATO II diagram from 1961 depicted two students: a boy wired into a terminal on the left, and a girl to the right, with the rest of the system components in the middle. What PLATO’s designers had probably overlooked when they created that diagram is the fact that they’re facing each other. PLATO’s destiny was to bring people together.

  Only a few minutes’ exposure to PLATO IV was enough for people to realize that it upended the generally received view of computers up to that point, if one were to accept how books, movies, and media had portrayed them. PLATO wasn’t the evil self-aware intelligence, first seemingly benign but, after something going horribly wrong, now bent on destroying humanity. It most certainly wasn’t 2001’s HAL looking back at you through a foreboding round red glass “eye.” Nor was PLATO some boring number-crunching, tape-machine, card-reader, data-processing behemoth found in big banks and government agencies. PLATO was your friends looking back at you, through friendly orange dots.

  The Big Board games sparked an interest in a side of PLATO not contemplated by Bitzer, Alpert, or the funding agencies. This brave new side of PLATO was its social dimension, a dimension we take for granted today but that at the time was unforeseen, both at PLATO and in popular culture. Think of the way computers had been depicted up to that point: HAL in 2001 and the Enterprise’s computer in Star Trek were both sociable, capable of communicating by voice, but there was no hint of interpersonal communication between multiple people through the computer. The computer was a tool, you asked it questions, it gave you answers. The killer app came out of nowhere, yet in hindsight its arrival was obvious: the social side of PLATO exploded as the result of a perfect storm of ingredients, timing, and user community. Combine the permissive culture of CERL, the rise of the new wave of kids pouring in to check out this cool system with its Orange Glow, and the availability of the right mix of programming tools, and the rise of the killer app was inevitable.

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  Besides the fact that they were fun, one reason for the sudden rise of multiplayer PLATO games was that their creators took advantage of a system feature called “common.” “Common” enabled a TUTOR lesson to set aside a chunk of computer memory that could be shared with other lessons. Each lesson that had attached this “common” to its own memory could take turns reading from and writing to it, enabling each participating lesson to share whatever data the lesson’s author intended. Without this one feature of TUTOR, it’s doubtful that multiplayer games on PLATO would have ever taken off the way they did. Game authors could instead have coded their games to write data directly to a disk file, but compared to memory, disks were painfully slow (a PLATO lesson’s disk use was measured in DAPMs—disk accesses per minute—and the number wasn’t allowed to get very big). Having programs communicate with each other via a shared disk file would have ground the programs (and possibly the entire system) to a halt. The fast reading and writing in CYBER’s computer memory gave games the ability to instantly share data among players. That’s how each player knew where other players were in the game, what direction and speed they were moving, what their scores were, their level of damage, whether they had fired weapons, and so on. TUTOR’s common was pure gold to a game author.

  PLATO was not the only system that had this kind of capability, known as “inter-process communications” and “shared memory” elsewhere. Many time-sharing systems of the era also offered, or would soon offer, such features. Indeed, the FORTRAN language had a feature called “COMMON blocks” going back to the mid-1960s, which did something similar. TUTOR’s “common” had been named after it.

  Given how rapidly things evolved in the early years of PLATO IV, what with the rising tide of interest from students, not only did new Big Board games begin to sprout up overnight, but new functionality would appear in them as well. The Big Boards began to offer ways for players to type and send messages to other players. They could be in the same room or thousands of miles away. Sending and receiving messages via a game’s Big Board opened up a vast new set of possibilities for PLATO. It quickly dawned on users that talking with other users online was enjoyable and useful in its own right. Why even bother playing the game if what you really were after was the attention of that cute girl who was currently listed as “available” in a Big Board game?

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  Doug Brown had graduated Springfield High School in 1970 and was now an electrical engineering undergraduate at UI working as a junior systems programmer part-time at CERL during the school year and full time during summers. Other Springfield High students, younger friends of Brown’s like Marshall Midden, Steve Freyder, and Mark Rustad, would also work summers at CERL on particular programming projects, but then they would go back to Springfield in the fall. Brown wanted to stay in touch with them more often and found it difficult to do so.

  Then he had an idea. Why not create a lesson whereby a user could “talk” to another through the terminal? It was as if he took the concept of the Big Board to its ultimate conclusion: forget the game behind the Big Board, just have a Big Board, and enable users to join what would decades later be called chat rooms, wherein they could chat. That’s it. The “game” was the chatting. Brown called his program “Talkomatic.” It sported a feature that took advantage of the Fast Round Trip principle going all the way back to PLATO I a dozen years earlier: if a user types a character, that input signal should travel as fast as possible from the user’s keyboard, through the terminal, across the phone line, into the computer, and back out of the computer into the terminal’s screen, all in a tenth of a second. If the user typed “hello,” then the “h” and then the “e” and the “l” and the “l” and the “o” would appear with a
s little delay as possible, enabling the user to interact at the speed of thought.

  Experimental chat programs existed in various time-sharing environments prior to PLATO IV, even including a primitive TALK program on PLATO III. Most followed the line-by-line style of messaging programs that arose in the decades to come, including Unix’s Internet Relay Chat, AOL’s Instant Messenger, Apple’s Messages, Google Chat, and Facebook Messenger. This meant that when you typed in your message to someone, the recipient did not see your message until you were done typing all of it and then sent it. Brown hated this type of typed communication, and was determined to design Talkomatic to exploit PLATO’s Fast Round Trip. The result: character-by-character chat using TUTOR’s “common” function to share one user’s typed message with another. As one user typed some text, the other user saw those text characters appear live, one by one. If the typing user made a mistake, and deleted some characters and then retyped them, the other participant saw, in real time, the mistake being made and the sudden correction and retyping. Today most messaging applications continue to operate in the other way: you don’t see another’s message to you until the whole message is typed and then sent. If an application developer is kind, they may provide a clue that your correspondent is Out There somewhere, by saying “so-and-so is typing” with a little busy icon. In Talkomatic, the individual characters of each participant’s messages served as their own “progress indicators”—in user-interface design terms, you cannot offer a more transparent or elegant solution. Talkomatic was the typewritten equivalent of a phone call or conference call.

  Brown’s original motivation—a way to stay in touch with his Springfield friends—limited the scope of Talkomatic’s original design to one-on-one chat. But soon Brown’s office mate Dave Woolley was collaborating with him, and the combination proved fruitful. Talkomatic soon had chat rooms in the form of “channels,” like those of CB radio, and in each channel up to five people could participate in a group chat. Over time features would be added that enabled users to make a chosen channel private, or lock a formerly open channel so no others could join it. Inside a channel, the participants were each given four lines’ worth of screen space in which to type. With five users banging away at their keyboards, a channel heated up and became a thing to behold for the participants: the text of each user kept changing, character by character. Letters formed words, words formed phrases and sentences, flying across the screen. It became instantly clear who was a fast typist and who was slow. (For some users the temptation to judge a slow typist a slow thinker was strong, however misguided such a judgment might be.)

  Talkomatic became the new hot game, even though it wasn’t a game. But then, it was. In fact, perhaps it was the most exciting game of all. For some users, it was an online “place” where a bunch of friends could hang out and chat online, make jokes, gossip, yak, talk. For others, it was a way to meet mysterious other users who connected via terminals in far-flung places like Chicago, Delaware, Hawaii, or New York.

  For yet other users, it was a place to play tricks on other users. (Forty years later a term would arise for this kind of trickery on the Internet: catfishing.) For instance, pretend you were a girl when you were actually a guy. Given the highly skewed male-to-female ratio among the PLATO user community, if someone named, say, “Lisa” presented herself in Talkomatic, guys were unlikely to exhibit any doubt. “There was this one guy,” recalls John David Eisenberg, “I don’t remember his name, his first name was Craig, and he would always go in Talkomatic as ‘Sally.’ It was some guy who worked for some military installation out on the East Coast….I know he was in some government, military thing. And he would always go in as ‘Sally’ just to find out what kind of reaction he’d get. That’s the first instance I know of people sort of masquerading as somebody completely different.”

  In time, enough Talkomatic users were fooled that the prank would wear out its welcome. (Years later, when The New Yorker published its famous “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon, PLATO users of a certain age could crack a smile tempered with “been there, done that” recognition.)

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  The CERL system staff saw Talkomatic, saw that the hold it had on users, noted its obvious utility, and acknowledged that this form of communication was powerful and useful. Systems programmer Dave Andersen was tasked with creating a program that provided a way for any PLATO author to instantly “page” another author and open up a two-way typed conversation at the bottom of the screen. It was one thing for people to enter lesson “Talkomatic” and chat in one of the channels there. It was another thing entirely to embed a “talk” capability across the entire PLATO system, no matter what you—and the person you wished to talk to—were doing online at the moment. Andersen used privileged, system-level TUTOR commands unavailable to regular authors to make PLATO send output to two terminals instead of one. If user A got paged by user B, and user A answered the talk request and typed “hi,” the “h” and the “i” showed up both on A’s screen as well as B’s. Likewise, when user B began typing, her characters showed up on her own screen, one by one, as well as user A’s. On December 19, 1973, Andersen posted a note online letting the world know that TERM-talk was officially available. “An inter-station communication option has been provided,” the note said. “TERM-talk will allow an author to talk to another author at another station.”

  TERM-talk instantly became one of the foundational components of the PLATO user experience. It was the live, character-by-character typed equivalent of a phone conversation—with Caller ID even—at a time before cell phones and texting or instant messaging. As long as the person you wished to talk to was online, you could reach them. That is, unless that other person did not want to talk to you, in which case when they saw the TERM-talk alert blinking at the bottom of their screen, they could hold down the SHIFT key, press TERM, and then type “reject” at the “What term?” arrow instead of typing “talk.” This enabled the callee to reject the call.

  “TERM-talk was strangely useful but sort of weird,” says Silas Warner, who was a PLATO user at Indiana University. “To be interrupted in your work…people would page you just to chat, which was distracting, to say the least, if you were deep inside some programming code trying to get something working. It was like having a total stranger right out of the blue, calling you up on the phone at night saying, ‘Hi there. Wanna talk?’ ” By 1978 enough people had experienced this type of unwanted interruption via TERM-talk that CERL released a new feature, “TERM-busy,” which made you unavailable from TERM-talks. If someone tried to page you, but you had gone into “busy mode,” you would receive a message at the bottom of your screen saying “user name/group wants to talk with you” and that user would see a message saying that the user they wished to talk with “is busy, but has been told you called.”

  TERM-talk took PLATO by storm, and before long, a variant would be developed specifically to help CERL’s PSO group of online consultants provide what would today be called “live chat with a support person.” On PLATO the feature was called “TERM-consult,” and it epitomized the can-do, how-can-we-help culture of CERL by enabling any author or instructor to get help from one of the PSO staff online in the equivalent of a TERM-talk. Instead of a PSO person hopping on a plane or train or bus and traveling to some remote PLATO dial-up site to help out a user with a technical problem, they could just make themselves available as online consultants ready to respond to a user’s “TERM-consult” request.

  What made online consults particularly remarkable was the fact that they took advantage of another new feature the systems staff added. TERM-talk required modifying the system code so that the typed output from one user showed up on another user’s screen, and vice versa. Well, what would happen if you sent all of the output of one user’s screen to the other user’s screen? Today it’s called “screen sharing,” but on PLATO, decades earlier, the feature was known as “monitor mode.” With monitor mode and online PSO consultants, it w
as possible for a TUTOR programmer to get expert help within seconds. For example, a programmer might be stuck trying to figure out how to use a particular TUTOR command, or perhaps the command was not doing what was expected, and the programmer’s productivity had ground to a halt. A quick TERM-consult call could get a PSO person on the line, and instead of the programmer having to type a long essay on exactly what the problem was and what the section of TUTOR code looked like, they could switch into monitor mode with the consultant, allowing the consultant to see the programmer’s screen. Suddenly, the consultant, who might be down the hall or ten thousand miles away, could see the very code causing the problem, and continue chatting, TERM-talk style, at the bottom of the screen with the programmer. A programmer learned quickly to fully test their code and consider every possibility before invoking TERM-consult, as there was nothing more humiliating than having an online PSO person point out a missing comma or other typo in the code. Monitor mode was so useful that it was added to normal TERM-talks; during one, either party could simply press SHIFT-LAB and take both users into monitor mode to share screens.