The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  On PLATO, text characters were not encoded in ASCII, or EBCDIC, or the more recent UTF-8, or any other scheme that was then or is now commonly deployed on commercial computers. Reflecting the underlying Control Data hardware design, the PLATO system transmitted text to terminals in 20-bit words containing three 6-bit characters and two extra control bits. ASCII was a 7-bit, later extended to 8-bit, encoding that in 8 bits has enough room in it for 255 different characters. PLATO’s 6-bit encoding only had room for 64 characters, and not even enough room for capitalized versions of “a” through “z.” To capitalize a letter, PLATO needed two characters, the first encoded in such a way that it indicated that the next character should be displayed in capitalized form. (For years, when Control Data printers would print out TUTOR source code or the contents of a notesfile archive, any capitalized letters would appear as an up-arrow character followed by the letter. A full line of capitalized text was therefore a sight to be seen, riddled with alternating up-arrows and barely readable.) Likewise, to display a superscripted or subscripted character (for example, an algebra lesson that needed to display on-screen an equation like a2 × b2 = c2), a specially encoded character would precede the displayed alphanumeric, so the terminal knew to raise or lower the character. All kinds of “modes” were encoded in this fashion. But what made things particularly interesting was the fact that it was possible to type certain combinations of special keys and alphanumeric keys using the keyboard itself, with the result that a user could send the terminal into one of these special display modes and sometimes do very weird things. It took practice and often a cheat sheet, but once you mastered the codes, you could create what years later on the Internet would be called emoticons and smileys. Given the fancy display modes available for PLATO characters, one did not have to turn one’s head sideways to see that the primitive pageant of a colon, followed by a hyphen, followed by a right parenthesis would become the Internet’s attempt to draw a smiling face. With PLATO, one could hold down the SHIFT key, press the space bar, and while nothing looked any different on the screen (PLATO terminals lacking a blinking cursor), the next character of text you typed would appear on top of the previous character. While such a capability might not seem at first glance to offer any useful benefit, it turned out that superimposing one or more characters, through successive SHIFT-spaces, had the consequence of creating all sorts of funny faces, sad faces, scary faces, beer and wine glasses, martini glasses, and an infinite list of other unusual images. Thus were emoticons born on PLATO. Over the years they would be collected, cheat-sheet style, in a TUTOR file called “m4,” whose inspect code was blank so anyone could go in and discover the meaning of character combinations like WOBTAX and VICTOR.

  As with other features of PLATO, there was an educational benefit to having this strange capability of character manipulation. For instance, you could use it to form non-Roman alphabetic characters that were impractical using only a downloadable character set, as there wasn’t enough room, or it required too much fancy typing on the part of the student or lesson author. Some foreign language lessons, including some in Hebrew and Hindi, used the ingenious solution of combining special character sets with what were called “microtables,” similar to what in a word processor or spreadsheet today would be called a “macro,” a recorded combination of keypresses that could be invoked or “played back” by pressing a much simpler sequence of keys (hence, the reason for the MICRO key on the PLATO IV keyboard).

  Red Sweater helped popularize these digital hieroglyphs but, even more, helped popularize the spread of animated sequences of characters. “The animations were a result of a quirk in the PLATO architecture,” says Parrello, “which was that several of the display control codes—mode rewrite, half-space, back-space, move up, move down—could be entered from the keyboard. You could therefore type in a string that when it was displayed did all sorts of neat graphic stuff. The basic bread-and-butter animation was an asterisk that moved from left to right.”

  Probably the most essential of the special character encoding modes that one could invoke by typing magical sequences on the keyboard was mode rewrite. Mode rewrite simply meant that the displayed character’s pixels would rewrite over any pixels already activated “underneath” it. Now imagine, if you will, displaying a right-leaning slash (/), then typing SHIFT-space, then typing the mode rewrite sequence, then typing a vertical slash (|), then another SHIFT-space, another mode rewrite, then a backslash (), and sitting back to watch the results. What would be the results? You’d have to watch quickly, because it would animate in the blink of an eye, but if you watched closely you would see an albeit tiny, and crude, but nevertheless twirling, baton. And if you added hyphens (a poor man’s horizontal baton, if you will) with more mode rewrites all at the right spots in between the right-leaning, vertical, and left-leaning slashes, the animation was even smoother: now you had a more vivid animated baton. Repeat the whole process a few iterations and the baton just might twirl for a whole second or two.

  But this was only the beginning. With hours, days, weeks of late-night trial-and-error, it was possible to discover all sorts of ways to draw not only twirling batons, but essentially any kind of pixel, line, or other image desired. The constraints, as usual on PLATO, were horrendous, like an army of gremlins determined to deny one’s completion of a work of art. Perhaps the most obvious constraint was that a line of text only supported sixty-four characters, and since every special character in a mode-setting sequence of characters counted as a separate character, a determined animator would run out of space very quickly unless he or she figured out how to continue the sequence of animated codes using the next line, first repositioning the terminal’s invisible cursor back up to the previous line and then getting on with the animation. This was painstaking work.

  Red Sweater mastered the art of PLATO character animation, and showed off the fruits of his labor in notesfiles as well as through inline animations in his articles and columns in News Report. He figured how to use the microtables to store common emoticons and animations, and peppered his News Report articles with them. He had flying asterisks and bows shooting arrows, the inevitable twirling baton, and a little stick figure that would throw things, including batons, up into the air and then catch them on the way back down.

  Not everyone appreciated Red Sweater’s animations showing up in and polluting public notesfiles. A complicated animation might take the same amount of time—perhaps ten seconds—that a full page of text took to plot on the screen. Thus, a little stick figure twirling, throwing, and catching a baton might rob a busy notes-reader of ten seconds of his precious time. That rubbed a sufficient number of CERL staffers the wrong way that Red Sweater’s continued use of PLATO was threatened. But right out of the blue came none other than Bruce Sherwood, the foe of every gamer and game author, the senior systems software staffer who was constantly fighting this or that battle over precious system resources. Sherwood was quite taken with Red Sweater’s animation talent, and created a notesfile, =anim=, to serve as a proving ground of new animated creations and repository of collected works that had been posted to other notesfiles. All well and good, but viewing the animations notesfile was a whole different matter: such activity was considered “recreational” by many PLATO classroom monitors and therefore an outrageous waste of precious resources better spent on algebra lessons and whatnot, so many an animation admirer hanging out in the file would discover themselves quickly booted off the system and sometimes kicked out of the classroom.

  These special “creatures” unique to the PLATO environment, namely, emoticons and character animations, could not exist elsewhere, and could only be viewed on a PLATO screen. Their continued existence, at least in the convoluted, arcane form they took on PLATO, was threatened if the environment in which they evolved and flourished was threatened. Emoticons on other computer systems using the more conventional, and vastly more widespread, ASCII character encoding, would evolve differently. The environments might have been more co
mmonplace, but they were far less interesting in terms of quirkiness and capability. So users wound up doing “smileys” that required a sideways glance to understand. With networks of minicomputers and microcomputers to form the Internet and the World Wide Web, ASCII smileys proliferated, although without any sort of evolutionary transformation and increase in sophistication that was the hallmark of the PLATO world. The first recorded ASCII smiley, from 1981, looks exactly like the smileys that a billion Twitterers and Facebookers will type in the next twenty-four hours. Character animations, thanks to ASCII, never had a chance on personal computers and the Internet, but also thanks to ASCII, the primitive emoticons have survived and will be with us for years to come. PLATO-style emoticons and animations are long extinct, and have become, like the rest of PLATO, dusty artifacts for curious digital archaeologists to study. They represent another example of the inevitability of invention when a large, heterogeneous community of users get access to a system that not only permits, but encourages, creativity of expression.

  —

  As for News Report, it was ahead of its time by decades. “Bruce took News Report very seriously,” says Al Groupe. “He was really trying to break new ground and compete with The Daily Illini.”

  The ideas and visions that News Report engendered were, in hindsight, brilliantly prescient and predicted the course of much that was to come. “At one time I had a dream of selling advertising,” Parrello says. “I was told that was definitely not going to be allowed.” When asked by a Daily Illini reporter in 1975 if there was anything wrong with News Report, he replied that it was the “lack of opportunity for profit.” Said Parrello, “The problem with getting a newspaper profit on PLATO is that all the profits go to the CERL people.” Parrello dreamed of more readers, extending News Report to everyone on PLATO, not just authors who’d heard about it and could access it from the Author Mode, but students, staff, faculty, and the general public (perhaps accessing it through public terminals in the Illini Union or the University Library). He told The Daily Illini he “would like to see the situation changed to allow anyone using the PLATO system” to use News Report. He even envisioned “classified ads and possibly a bulletin board system.”

  News Report was real, and it lasted as a vibrant online resource for some two years, but the idea of it being a sustainable, ongoing concern was just a dream. Like so many compelling PLATO-based projects built by college students, its future was doomed if for no other reason than the fact that Parrello was a college student, and college students eventually graduate (some, at any rate). He stayed on for a few more years at UI, working in the Foreign Languages Lab. “I would periodically want to make something more of it,” Parrello would say years later, looking back on News Report, “to try and build it into something that had a future, getting press passes for the reporters, and things like that. But none of that ever really materialized. I mean, let’s face it, my education was my first priority, and hobbies would stay hobbies.” News Report limped on after he left the UI for a while at least, but without his daily input and editorial oversight the service withered away, particularly due to the built-in expiration of articles and reporters.

  Parrello would continue wearing the red sweater when he moved to Northern Illinois University for his graduate work, and, when he got married in 1978, the thank-you notes he sent to well-wishers were stamped in red with a return address that began with “T.R. Sweater and Wife.” The sweater issue would continue for a while longer. “It wasn’t until I switched from mainframes to personal computers in the mid-1980s that the whole sweater thing started to die down,” Parrello says. In a 1997 interview he explained his clothing compulsion this way: “Nowadays I have a whole closet full of identical sweaters, but twenty years ago I was extremely superstitious about the sweater thing and had only one. Fortunately, I’m much more mature now, and no longer believe a mere piece of cloth can bring you good luck.” However, he was quick to add, “I still take three backups and sprinkle my PC with holy water before installing a Windows 95 application, but I think a lot of people do the same thing.”

  19

  The Supreme Being and the Master of Reality

  In her 1984 book The Second Self, Sherry Turkle writes about the MIT computer culture of the 1970s and early 1980s. For Turkle the “second self” is the computer itself: she observed that as people stayed glued longer and longer in front of their computers, they saw something of themselves in the computer and something of the computer in themselves. What she saw at MIT were largely groups of young programmers spending way too much time on their computers. In her 1996 follow-up book, Life on the Screen, Turkle would explore a phenomenon that had either never arisen or had been overlooked during the research for The Second Self: the fact that perhaps the computer was not one’s second self, or merely that, but rather, the computer enabled you to create a second self, a persona, online. Had Turkle ventured into any of the PLATO sites around the country during the 1970s, she would have discovered that many users had gone straight to this second stage: sure, many of the new wavers would identify as hackers and lived to program and make PLATO do things, but just as many, if not a lot more, found in PLATO a way to develop lives on the screen, sometimes adopting names different from their real-world names, and often adopting quite different personae as well. The Red Sweater was probably the most famous early example. But with the rise of Talkomatic chat rooms, multiplayer games, and notesfiles, and the wide range of tools available in the TUTOR language to build new programs, PLATO users found a multitude of ways to express themselves differently in the online context than in their flesh-and-blood context. All during the 1970s the notions of identity (who are you in the real world, and who are you online, and who might you become online) and presence (you not only exist in the real world, but you exist—there you are, you can see yourself on the Users List—in the online world) became an increasingly noticeable phenomenon. For some users with an inclination to write, PLATO was fast becoming a wide-open new platform for expression and for sharing ideas and stories whether brief or epic in length. Those ideas and stories might be told using one’s own identity, or perhaps from the perspective of a persona other than the writer’s own. News Report, Pad, Discuss, and many notesfiles provided such outlets for expression.

  PLATO users, particularly teen and college-age users, began to utilize the system not just for fun, but as a new way to express themselves, either as themselves or via an invented persona. Initially the personae were but pseudonyms chosen for the Big Board game lists. But with the arrival of Talkomatic and notesfiles, something new, never seen before, was becoming available: PLATO was becoming a platform for expression the way the Web would become years later.

  —

  When David Woolley released in early 1976 a major upgrade to PLATO Notes, it ushered in a new era on PLATO where anyone with disk space could create a notesfile on any topic and allow or deny anyone access. Overnight, a slew of new notesfiles, eventually numbering in the hundreds and later thousands, were created.

  In some notesfiles devoted to genre entertainment (science fiction, comic books, movies, and so forth), some users began creating what were called “round-robin stories,” where one user would post a new note containing a few lines or paragraphs of some invented story, then someone else would come along and reply to the base note with more lines or paragraphs continuing the story like improv comedians. This would continue indefinitely, with a crazy patchwork narrative emerging to the great amusement of the notesfile participants. One such round-robin story began in =comics=, the notesfile devoted to comic books. The story concerned “The PLATO Patrol,” a band of superheroes each of whom possessed certain special powers. The PLATO Patrol had started and had already made a name for themselves as a group of PLATO users, most of whom had never met face-to-face, in =pad= a year or two earlier, where they posted stories describing their fictional heroic exploits. They even printed up business cards, which included the names Quetzal, Red Sweater, Blueman, Fantasia, and Mole
cule Master. “No Job Too Small,” the card declared, and underneath, “Universe-Saving Our Specialty,” and listing CERL’s actual main phone number beneath that.

  “There were originally five people in the group,” says Parrello, “and the stories took place in a weird mishmash of the Marvel and DC universes….The original five heroes were the Red Sweater, who could project force fields around himself; Fantasia, who could absorb and generate almost any kind of energy; Quetzal, who could teleport things at will and project streams of quick-drying guano from his fingertips; Blueman, who could duplicate the powers of any other superhero; and Baron Vitellio Scarpia, whose powers were never fully explained but who had an interesting personality. Various others came in and dropped out along the way, including one guy called Fierdraken who could breathe fire.”

  Fantasia was Mary Ann Neuman. Quetzal was the creation of Bill Roper, a student at Southern Illinois University down in Carbondale. Blueman was one Kim Metzger out at Indiana University. The PLATO Patrol stories were such a big hit, says Parrello, that they eventually found a home in their own private notesfile, where the stories continued for several years. At least once, all of the members of the Patrol set aside a weekend to make a pilgrimage to CERL. Each of them showed up in costume and held what today might be regarded as a miniature Comic-Con convention.

  With News Report, Red Sweater had already demonstrated how PLATO had become a platform for expression. Like online ventures that would appear decades later, success meant a need for more resources, particularly disk space. Where were all these content submissions to go? Disk space was beyond hard to come by, but soon, the user submissions were getting so big and unwieldy there was only one solution: jumpout.