The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  As a group, a number of the operators had a reputation, deserved or not, for being stoners. The leader of the operators for a number of years was Al Harkrader, a perfect choice for managing that group: he had a quick wit, quicker smile, was liked by everyone, and took his job seriously. He also was no slouch at programming, and, seeing that some of the operators, particularly those on the graveyard shift, not only might be stoners but also might be high while on the job, decided to write a set of operator utility programs that made it nigh impossible for an operator to screw up. As Dave Fuller described it, Harkrader’s software was “bulletproof and stoner-proof. The most important thing was stoner-proof.”

  The Zoo attracted an odd assortment of people during the night, people of different ages, backgrounds, personalities. What they shared was a compulsion to play games. One such gamer was Patrick Clifford. Who also happened to be a cop.

  After receiving his undergraduate degree in aviation, Clifford found no relevant jobs in Champaign-Urbana. On a lark, he decided to take a job for deputy sheriff in Champaign County, and was hired. He was assigned a night shift that ended at 2 a.m. “PLATO was perfect,” he says. “I didn’t want to go home and go to bed—too keyed up—and there was very little else to do in C-U at that time of the night. I had already become a part of the PLATO community, [so] I spent most of my off-duty time over at CERL. Of course, I was required to carry a gun even off duty, so I had one with me all the time when I was at CERL. It got to the point that most everyone knew me and who/what I was and were pretty comfortable with it. It did cause some awkward moments, though, like the time I came over to CERL on the way home from work to pick up some prints or something and walked in, in full uniform, on a new operator…smoking what appeared to be a rather strange-looking and -smelling cigarette. He almost had a heart attack….

  “If something strange was going on, like the time the operator found a guy passed out in the elevator (she thought he was dead, initially)…or when a couple of Empire players would take getting killed a little too personally, someone usually dragged me in to help out. Actually, that’s kind of how I got my PLATO pseudonym, ‘The Enforcer.’ ”

  —

  A common critique of B. F. Skinner’s behavioral experiments on rats is that if all organisms exhibited the same kinds of learning behaviors, then are humans no different from rats in mazes looking for cheese? Legions of critics have argued this for decades. With PLATO, whose creators had been, whether consciously or not, influenced greatly by the work of Skinner, it might be argued that the lessons and quizzes students were assigned to take were at least metaphorically not unlike Skinner’s experimental mazes, and the feedback issued by PLATO during, and the grades received upon completion, were the cheese. What Skinner might not have anticipated, however, was that sometimes an idea—an itch of curiosity, if you will—would enter the minds of these particular “rats,” causing them to desire to occasionally climb up and peer out of their “maze,” so that they could gaze upon whatever lay beyond. And what lay beyond? More mazes, more rats. Sometimes these other mazes were more complex, meandering in more interesting ways, leading the gazing rat to forget its own cheese and focus on the cheese in an adjacent maze. Pursuing that other rat’s cheese might lead to even more intriguing mazes inside of which scurried even other rats.

  Infinite mazes, infinite cheese, in every direction. This realization of the infinite potential and explorability of PLATO dawned on Richard Powers right away.

  One day he found his physics professor, Dr. David C. Sutton, in the PLATO lab, sitting there hacking away at TUTOR code, authoring a new physics lesson. Sutton noticed Powers was interested. “There was a huge gulf between this lowly freshman in this class of several hundred and the lecturer for this class,” says Powers, “but he kind of beckoned me over and I sat down and he said, ‘You want to see how this is done?’ and I said, ‘Yes, indeed,’ and he pulled up his authoring account and he began to take me through my first exposure to TUTOR.”

  Powers continues, “Burrowing into the little tendrils that would open and close in the system had a kind of physical analog.” Each day that Powers spent in the PLATO lab drew him ever closer, like a euphoric moth, to the orange flame of the plasma pixels. Like so many students before and after, he would begin to notice, usually out of the corner of his eye, the Orange Glow elsewhere on campus: if you paid attention, you noticed right away that there were terminals all over the place. In time, like so many countless others had done before, he found CERL itself, the Ground Zero of the system, its birthplace, the Glow’s point of origin.

  But there were other rooms accessed from other mazes in other buildings too. Some rooms might be deserted, or tiny, or both, with just two or three or four terminals, or, if he was really lucky, just one. “What you would do,” says Powers, “if you found a new terminal, is to sit down, and you would start going through the various signons that you had acquired—I hate to say it—either legitimately, or by stealth. And you would try them out, one by one, and see which ones would be accepted by the security on that system. And my God, I must have had tremendous memory at that time, because I could remember all these different signons and logins and some of them were multiples and some of them were private and there would be this moment of elation to discover that this machine would accept the signon that would get you into all of this material that the other sites were trying to clamp down on, the real CPU-intensive games, or what have you. And then you’d feel like, now you’d have a little bit more power. And now you have to kind of guard it from other people. You can’t just let anybody know that machine will take this signon, because, first of all, you’ll never get back on it, and, second of all, eventually the site monitors are going to find out about it and shut it down. And now I kind of understood after a year of scrounging around and following these physical trails why everyone was so cagey with me when I leaned over, in the lab, and said, Hey, how did you get on that? They were protecting their privileges and their hard-won entry into the system.”

  With his experience on PLATO, Powers saw firsthand how important identity was to this new digital world. Not just one identity, but many: the trick to the digital world was that you would have to learn how to juggle a whole bag full of identities, like a spy with a pocketful of passports, each enabling you to become yet another rat seeking yet another piece of cheese in yet another, different, maze.

  “We kind of take that for granted now,” Powers says, “but this first glimpse of the fact that I had an existence to other people without any physical connection, and they with me, was really novel for me at that moment too.”

  Powers’s relentless pursuit of higher levels of access, beyond several student signons, the legitimate and stealthy demo signons, the word-of-mouth secrets yielding access to what he would later call “ill-gotten entry points,” finally, in time, led him to take a summer job as a site monitor in the biggest PLATO lab of them all, in the basement of the foreign languages building. In his role as site monitor, he sat perched behind a bunker with a view out to a sea of orange: some eighty terminals tucked away in custom wooden carrels in front of which sat eighty students typing and touching and, one hopes, learning, and, sometimes, doing the same kinds of illicit online activities that he himself had done. Only now he was a site monitor, with the power to kick those ne’er-do-wells off the system and send them packing. Until now he’d been the enforced; Powers had now become the enforcer. A little bit more power.

  Powers finally had an author signon. If burrowing into secret tendrils and stealing glances at unattainable vistas was enough to blow his mind before, then having an author signon now was truly arriving at the Promised Land. With an author signon, he would be able to write programs. “I began experimenting with TUTOR,” Powers says. “I guess my first bit of code was a kind of concrete, interactive rendition of T. S. Eliot’s poetry, using the text placement and rotation and interactive components of TUTOR to do a lesson introducing beginning students to poetry and reading and interp
reting.”

  Joseph Dewey, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, has written a book about Powers and his novels. “His use of computer science as a trove of metaphor,” says Dewey, “is consistent throughout his work. His early training as a computer programmer served him when he turned to fiction. The metaphors of connection, simulated reality, and the inevitable loneliness at the heart of computer communication became essential metaphors for his take on late-twentieth-century computer culture. Rick uses science for its metaphoric impact in every novel: genetics, oncology, pediatric medicine, computer programming, virtual reality environments…the list is long.” Dewey calls Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2 a “fictional autobiography,” where “he recounts his own introduction to its premise.”

  Powers may have been a physics major, but he was drawn increasingly to the humanities, not because he lost interest in the sciences, but because the humanities helped him see the sciences in a new light. One day during Powers’s junior year, Professor Robert Schneider, who was teaching an honors course, urged Powers to pursue the humanities with increased vigor. Dewey says that Schneider convinced Powers that “literature was the ‘perfect place for someone who wanted the aerial view.’ ” Schneider was persuasive enough for Powers to drop out of physics and switch his major to English and rhetoric. “The struggle for me,” says Powers, “was between some kind of legitimate generalist’s pursuit and the specialization required to really excel in most disciplines. I felt that call for increased specialization certainly by my junior year in physics, and I think it was the kind of terror at closing doors that made me seek out literature as a kind of aerial view. And if I were to fit PLATO in there, I think for me the fascination with the system was that it did open out into so many different disciplines, that it could be a domain where the teaching, the exploration, the archiving of so many different disciplines could all come together in a kind of new medium. When I left school, after graduating with a master’s degree in literature, it was computing where I made my first living.”

  By 1980, Powers was in Boston, working as a computer programmer at a data processing firm, working on an old NCR computer and writing in a COBOL-like language. It might not have been as elegant as the TUTOR language, and the NCR system lacked everything that made PLATO so inspiring, but it paid the bills. “For me,” he says, “that struggle with my own identity, in selecting majors, and in preparing to have a profession, was fought over that issue of individual disciplinary management versus a kind of archival or broad-based curatorial relationship to lots of different disciplines. And PLATO was my Alexandria. It was my library, it was the place where I could attach myself to anything. And it was also the place—you know, I wrote code before I wrote fiction—where I realized that, where I first saw where careful construction of words, in the right order, could create actual things, real data structures that then had behaviors, and acted as objects in this open-ended world. And I think it was a kind of latching on to literature simultaneously with latching on to the possibilities of cybernetic projection that landed me in the world of professional data processing and then ultimately, after a couple of years, starting on my first book.”

  Powers’s exposure to PLATO also led him to a fascination with microcomputers, first the TRS-80 and later the Apple II. It was an utterly different world from PLATO. If you’d asked the typical PLATO person what would top their list of things to take to a desert island, “a PLATO terminal and a phone line” would surely have been no. 1 and no. 2. Microcomputers, on the other hand, were desert islands. Who in their right mind would want to spend time futzing around with such a lonely, disconnected gadget? Sure, it could beep and bop and draw stick figures and display a small amount of text (usually in only barely legible capital letters), but it couldn’t get you into Empire. No Moria. No Avatar. And you couldn’t talk to people. No notesfiles to hang out in, no Talkomatic chat rooms, no TERM-talk instant messaging.

  None of that fazed Powers. Microcomputers attracted because they lacked PLATO’s enforcer, be it a human site monitor or the site control lessons that automatically kicked intrepid young explorers offline so “serious” users could do their work. “So long as your account was being monitored by somebody else,” he says, “and you had to produce something towards not necessarily your end, or source base, or your ability to get access to a machine that would allow you to have that open-ended ‘clay,’ so long as that was the case, you couldn’t go where you wanted to go. For me, the dream with the microcomputer, and I agree, it was a big step down, off the system…you cut the umbilical for two reasons. There’s an upside and a downside. The downside is that you’re no longer being fed and being connected to an online community. The upside is you can go it alone and you can do all those things that you weren’t allowed in, under strict social control.”

  18

  Red Sweater

  A frantic voice cried out, “Don’t turn on the lights!”

  Brand Fortner, an undergrad and junior systems programmer at CERL, headed upstairs one evening for another late night of work in the little office he shared with another staffer, who used it during the day. As he entered, he was startled to find someone hiding inside in the dark.

  “Excuse me?” Fortner asked the voice. “Red, is that you?”

  “Yes! Don’t turn on the lights! You have to find the red sweater for me!”

  Bruce Parrello had been washing his clothes in the basement laundry of his dorm. It was one of the few times he ever took his sweater off. Someone approached him, got talking with him, and sufficiently distracted him to cause him to leave the laundry for a moment. When he came back, he discovered that his precious red sweater was missing. Now he needed help getting it back.

  His name was Bruce Parrello, but everyone called him Red Sweater. For Parrello his whole life seemed wrapped around the sweater, which became a compulsion, an obsession. He had to wear it, indoors and out, every day—no matter what the outside temperature. When asked what the weather was like outside, he’d say it was “sweater weather.” For Parrello, the sweater was his one reliable, constant companion, his shield against the world. “Bruce also complained of chronically dry hands that would break out,” recalls another student, Al Groupe, “and so would always wear black leather gloves outside. Add to this ensemble a black briefcase, and you have Bruce.” He could sometimes seem uncomfortable communicating face-to-face, recalls CERL veteran Marilyn Beckman Bereiter. “Couldn’t look you in the eye. But you know, he was like an artist on the system.”

  Parrello had a thing for Orange Fanta soda. It was all he would drink. His friends were sure to have plenty of the orange stuff stocked in the fridge when he was visiting. Tim Halvorsen, Bill Galcher, and Donald Ware used to play a joke on Parrello by keeping an eye out for the soda machine man, so when he came by to refill CERL’s machine, they’d have a talk with him first in an attempt to persuade him to switch the Orange Fanta with Strawberry Fanta. They only managed to pull off this prank a few times.

  It was one thing to not have Orange Fanta on hand, but for Parrello to be without his red sweater was like waking up and discovering your arms and legs were missing. Especially awful, the night when Brand Fortner found him hiding in his dark office, was the knowledge that one or more troublemakers had deliberately stolen his sweater. “What really struck me,” Fortner later observed, “was that he didn’t want to be seen without it, he had to keep the lights off. I don’t think any of us realized how important that red sweater was to him. We thought it was kind of a joke.” Years later, when describing this incident, Parrello would admit, “I went completely insane.”

  Some forty years later, the perps who stole the sweater are still reluctant to discuss the caper. Marshall Midden, who then lived in Parrello’s dorm building, was in on it. Or roped in, more like, according to him. Midden says another PLATO scoundrel, Dave Fuller, planned the stunt, grabbed the sweater out of the washing machine, and at the last second looked around and stuffed the soaking-wet sweater under Midden’s shirt.
“He told me to shove it down my pants,” Midden says. Later, they dried the sweater, and Midden never saw it again. “Something about ransom. No Orange Fanta for a week, or something like that.”

  “Dave Fuller got other people to do things for him,” says Midden. “It would not surprise me…him doing the planning, viewing, snatching, washing and drying, and then get someone else involved to throw the suspicion off of himself.”

  During the sweater’s absence, Parrello reluctantly wore a yellowish gold windbreaker, leading some PLATO wags to temporarily apply a new nickname to him in the notesfiles online: “The Yellow Jacket.” Parrello was not amused. He eventually got his sweater back, and he promptly resumed wearing it. The theft, and his reaction to it, became legend. Says Rick Simkin, another PLATO-using UI student of the era, “after that, he stood guard when he did the wash.”

  —

  When Parrello entered UI in the fall of 1973, he did so as a sophomore, having managed to skip freshman year. This enabled him to snare a bachelor’s degree in December 1975. “Five semesters was enough,” he says, “because of a thing called the CLEP tests.” The College-Level Examination Program offered students a way of leapfrogging lower-level course requirements by proving they already knew the material. Only six people showed up to take the CLEPs the day Parrello went, “which was ridiculous,” he says. “If you passed all four you started as a sophomore.” But even that wasn’t enough for Parrello. He wanted to start as a junior. “I hunted down all the other proficiency tests the school offered, but I didn’t do nearly as well and ended up with only twelve more credits. It was enough to save me three semesters of tuition, however.”

  In high school, Parrello had discovered the benefits of always buying and keeping on hand the same set of clothes, and whenever he needed new clothes, he’d buy more of the same once again. “I had a tendency to stick with one basic outfit—red sweater, maroon shirt, dark pants,” says Parrello, “on the theory that it would take less time to shop for clothes if I knew what I wanted and didn’t have to browse. This eventually grew into a sort of trademark, to the point where if I wore something else it caused a disturbance.”