The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Perhaps the second best Empire player was Brian Blackmore, the eternal Number Two in an eternal struggle to become Number One. He was fast. He knew how to play. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of all the regulars. “Brian put in the thousands of hours that a true devotee did,” says Mitch. “Brian knew what it took to kill Andrew, and often did—but in a money situation, Brian would lose. Maybe he psyched himself. Once, Brian was on a roll, he had a terminal set up and he was taking on all comers. He was record shooting, killing people legitimately, going for the consecutive kills record of Andrew’s. He’d been at this for over twelve hours. And still at it, running on Mountain Dew and chips. Andrew heard about it and entered the game, and within fifteen minutes had ended Brian’s run at the record. Andrew was God.”

  Investing time to honing skills in Empire enabled the determined player to ascend a pyramid of glory that Empire’s authors had built into the game: the hall of fame. Empire’s authors went one step further: the hall of fame itself had a hall of fame. First there was the monthly hall of fame, and high achievers on that list were eligible for the other list, the all-time hall of fame. The monthly list was erased each month, after the entries on the list were examined by the program to identify who had earned a spot on the rarefied all-time list, if their scores were good enough. Over time, it was harder and harder to be good enough to get on the all-time list. But there were kids for whom this was their mission, their focus: to get all the way to the all-time top. Andrew Shapira was such a kid.

  —

  “Ineffable,” Tom Wolfe called it, in his book The Right Stuff: that indescribable mix of bravery, cool, and mastery of the forces of nature. Only a few had this quality. They knew they could lose it at any time. But if one managed to hold on to it, day after day, one might reach the pinnacle of what Wolfe called “the Ziggurat,” the pyramid of achievement, of glory, “to join that special few at the very top.”

  That was then, in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. By the 1970s, times were changing. The elite had changed. There was a new Ziggurat on the horizon. The old one was analog; the new one something entirely different, equally ineffable: it was digital, a pinnacle NASA’s fabled test pilots would probably have failed miserably climbing if they’d even noticed it. The only way to see this new pyramid, and to climb it, was to go online. To even know this new Ziggurat existed, you had to use computers. You had to know computers. There were only a few places around the country that had networked computers and were beginning to offer something resembling this Ziggurat. But each system was different, developing a different vibe, a different culture. In the East you had the hackers at MIT. In the West, more hackers at Stanford. And then, out in the cornfields of Illinois, you had the emerging PLATO culture, unlike anything else in the world at the time: a “digital Galápagos” that had evolved into its own thriving ecosystem isolated from the rest of the world. So far out in the middle of nowhere, nobody on the outside gave it much mind if they even knew about it. The ones who did had often rolled their eyes, especially at Bitzer, some insisting that his flat plasma display was a hoax. A fake. A trick. It uses mirrors. Or they would instantly dismiss PLATO as some uninteresting project having something to do with that boring e-word: education.

  But for those who had used the system, the education story was just what the suits talked about when they submitted proposals to the government for funding. It’s what the suits talked about when they shook hands with the suits at Control Data Corporation. It’s what the suits saw when they gave demos to other suits. But for those in the know, the new wave of kids who had lined up to PLATO like eager colonists to Mars, and turned the system into a wonderland that extended far past education, it was the teeming online culture filled with people hacking and yakking and spending hours on games that made PLATO fascinating. This wonderland was quite real, it was exploding, and to them it was very cool indeed. If only you bothered to spend a few minutes gazing into one of those screens, from which emanated the Orange Glow, poking around this vast new online world, you might begin to catch on, begin to realize you were gazing upon the future, the birth of cyberspace (at a time when it was powered by actual CYBER computers). Keep looking, and you would notice there was something here, some hint of a shape, an outline, a new challenge, a new pinnacle, that a lot of people were already climbing. If you wanted to begin, all you had to do was press NEXT. Beyond that single keypress beckoned a new digital Ziggurat.

  The wide base level of this new Ziggurat was not hard to reach. If you could read and type, you were halfway there. The base level was simply access. We take the concept of access for granted today, with enough laptops and tablets and smartphones and other gadgetry, not to mention the ubiquitous Ethernet and LTE and 4G and Wi-Fi that it’s all become a utility like electricity: you just assume the Net is there, out of sight, but always available. This was not the case with PLATO in the 1970s. Invariably, you had to go to it, it did not come to you. First you had to know it existed, then you had to know where to go to get it. You had to get to a terminal. Didn’t matter where, they were all the same. It was what was inside that orange screen that mattered. As so many kids had done, you might randomly stumble upon it, wandering through the halls of CERL or some other building that had terminals. Or a friend might have said, “Hey, let’s go play games on the computer” and dragged you to the Zoo, where your life might be changed forever. Or if you were not at UI, you might find terminals in whatever building had them at your PLATO site, be it in Hawaii or Connecticut or Delaware or Florida. Perhaps your professor had assigned your class one hour per week in a PLATO lab, to do lessons or simulations that counted toward your grade. If you were hooked by the system during your first exposure, you came back. Like Richard Powers, you learned to be on the lookout for what others were doing. You listened for tidbits of knowledge that might get you further, deeper online. Maybe you met a friendly Sherpa guide who showed you around, fired up a menu on the screen, gave you a tour of the system using one of the demo accounts. You got access. It was the first step, the foundation.

  Sometimes you had to do a little breaking and entering to get access. Says one former PLATO user who, years out of high school, still prefers to be anonymous for the shenanigans he pulled on PLATO, “We needed physical access to PLATO terminals where we wouldn’t be bothered after the 10 p.m. curfew for high school students. There were PLATO terminals in the education building on campus, and somehow we got a key to that building and made a copy of it. After that we had unrestricted access to PLATO. We would bring in pizza and play Empire all night.” Says Brian Redman, “I was the chemistry curriculum coordinator for a short period at the University of Arizona. I got the powers-that-be to let me take a terminal out of the library and put it in my lab for a summer so I could play Airfight twenty-four hours a day.” This type of thing was going on all over PLATO, wherever PLATO terminals were installed. You did whatever you had to do to achieve access. Sometimes you then hoarded it.

  “Keep in mind we were all under curfew age,” says Lee Johnson, “but our parents and we didn’t care. What nerds we were, sitting in a dark room in a musty old university building, lights out, squinting at the warm orange glow of screens. PLATO was a big part of my adolescence. I was too shy to make many friends or date girls. I lusted after girls, of course, but was not good enough for them, nor knew how to treat them, so PLATO filled up many lonely hours. My friends and I roamed all about the university campus in search of unrestricted PLATO terminals. We would find individual terminals in a study room on the fourth floor of some building, and immediately test it to see if it would allow our logins, and if we could play games. We would find ways into locked buildings, though I stopped short of actually jimmying locks or something. I’d just find an open door at an adjoining building, then walk over to the one with the terminals. I even got stopped by a prof once with a friend when we went to play some stupid chess or moon landing games at the Loomis Laboratory of physics. He called the university police on us.”

  Da
vid Soussan was a UI undergraduate who along with a few other addicts went to elaborate lengths to maintain undisturbed, after-hours access to PLATO in the music building classroom on weekends. “The lab closed around 8 p.m. Friday,” he says, “but what they didn’t know was the back wall of the cubicles along the back wall of the lab had been unscrewed and set in place. You could pull back this wall and crawl behind it, wait for the lab to clear out, and be locked up for the weekend. Then you wait another fifteen to twenty minutes in case someone forgot something before crawling out of your little hiding place and, voilà, you’ve got the whole lab to yourself.” He would order pizza to sustain himself over the weekend. “Every now and then, twenty or so minutes prior to the lab closing you’d pull the cubicle wall back and find someone else already hiding inside. Both of you there for the same purpose, neither wanting to lose the option or be called out, you just made room and hung out silently together.”

  The ultimate in access was, of course, a home PLATO terminal. In the early 1970s, very few had them. Bitzer had one, as did a number of the senior CERL staffers. Louis Bloomfield, the developer of several popular Big Board games, had one thanks to his father running UI’s medical school.

  Two families on the East Coast had home terminals. The wealthy financier Arthur Lipper had heard about PLATO, was a big believer, and so got a terminal for his family, and even opened up a for-pay “learning store” in a mall in New Jersey with some PLATO terminals. Lipper’s young son Chris became an Empire player, playing as an Orion all day long whenever he could. Henry Jarecki, a well-known psychiatrist and commodities financier, was friends with Lipper. He had heard Lipper had gotten this thing called a PLATO at home. Not to be outdone, he ordered one for his home. Obtaining a PLATO terminal at home during this era was as expensive as buying a new car, costing between $6,000 and $10,000, plus a few thousand more (possibly many thousands more) for the phone line per year.

  Lipper lived in New Jersey, Jarecki in White Plains. “He and Henry Jarecki were buddies, good friends. Rivals, at least,” says Garrie Burr, a CERL technician who would travel out to the East Coast to install and service their terminals. “It was always a case of one-upmanship. Henry lived in this great big huge mansion…this was a different world….We were sitting in the Lipper family room one night after I’d fixed the terminal and we’re sitting there watching TV and he turns to his wife and goes, ‘How’d you like to go to Florida?’ and she says, ‘Sounds good to me’ and he picked up the phone and ordered two first-class tickets to go down to Florida on vacation. This was just stuff beyond us.”

  At the Jarecki home, very young sons Andrew and Eugene wound up using the terminal for years, mainly for games. (Both brothers would in the 1990s become successful entrepreneurs, selling their company Moviefone to AOL for $400 million, and then after that both became successful again as award-winning filmmakers.) Says Eugene, who was five or six when the “big brown box” originally arrived at his house, “I guess my dad said he’d be the principal user. No one anticipated the child computer geek phenomenon at that time. So the fact that it was instantly easier for me to navigate my way around it, to type more quickly, to relate to the machine, I think had to do with the fact that I didn’t have the baggage somebody like my father had had, of reading books for a lifetime and interacting with the world in a far less push-button-interactive way.” Eugene would, like Chris Lipper, soon discover Empire, where he played on the Federation team. Even decades later, Jarecki described Empire as an addiction that never goes away. Eugene remembers chatting with inmates at the Menard Penitentiary in Illinois, a site participating in CERL’s PLATO Corrections Project. “I had a lot of TERM-talks with a couple of guys at Menard,” he says. It’s doubtful the prison had any idea that its inmates were chatting via computer with kids in the outside world.

  John Risken was putting in so many hours on the elementary reading project at CERL, he missed his family and they missed him. “My family was not seeing very much of me,” he says, “so I went to Bitzer and said, ‘Could I get a computer terminal at home, because then I could put in more time, and still be fair to my family?’ So we got a PLATO IV terminal…and I did a lot of work from home in the evenings….And even having gotten to be at home didn’t make a whole lot of difference. There was a time when my older son was in first grade, he drew a picture of the house at one time, at school. He brought it home, and my wife showed it to me when I got home that day. There’s our house, and there are three people standing in front of the house: my wife and two boys. And I said, ‘Well, where am I?’ ” His older son pointed, and there, inside the house, he could see a person hunched over a computer terminal.

  Access was so important, sometimes PLATO users would go to extreme lengths to get it. Bob Rader, one of CERL’s senior systems staffers, had a PLATO terminal at home. “One time,” says Rader, “I came home, and found not my son, but a friend of his,” using the terminal. “And he was the only person in the house!”

  Whatever it took.

  —

  There was more to access than just finding a physical terminal. Access was the prerequisite to everything that followed. All too soon your desire to see more, do more online, always more, meant that the freebie demos and temporary borrowing of someone else’s signon was not enough. You could keep finding and stealing them. That was easily enough done. But soon enough people always found out. To really have access you had to have your own signon. And the signon didn’t count unless it was an author signon.

  “I don’t know why it bit me so hard,” Doug Green says. “I became what you could call a hacker, I guess. Just to get into it, I wanted access. I wanted to be part of this. I wanted to experience it. I wanted to play on it. And I wanted to write on it. Author games. It just lit my fire.”

  Being a PLATO author was the next step up the Ziggurat. There was far more to climb, and if you had any ambition, any desire to get near to, or become one of, those “special few at the very top,” it was still a long, long way up. If you wanted a taste of TUTOR programming, you had to have an author signon. Having an author signon also got you a view high enough up to begin to see the lay of the land, this ever-changing digital landscape. With an author signon you began to see that “cyberspace” was a glistening, twinkling circuitlike sprawl, like that seen out of an airliner window at night when a plane has just taken off over a major city. It seemed every minute, every second was nonstop novelty, fun, controversies, arguments, games, and the goings-on of a vibrant community. There was more than any one human could handle, let alone comprehend. You had to learn to block a lot of it out. For PLATO users, this marked the beginning of what the majority of people in the world now cope with every day: the difficulty of filtering out all the noise. Once online with a PLATO author signon, the real world, real life, with all its nonsense of war, poverty, crime, scandals, failing economy, politics, and worries about school, all of it melted away, replaced by the frenetic online community of PLATO, where novelty was the operative term. Being online on PLATO was like being in a town that was growing quickly, becoming a small city on its way to becoming a metropolis, and in time, a nation without borders, built of not just zeroes and ones, but minds.

  There was something else that you discovered once you had an author signon and began exploring the system. From that second step up on this new digital Ziggurat, you made a shocking discovery. There were other Ziggurats. You could see them. Plain as day. There they were. This new digital environment opened up all kinds of possibilities, all sorts of ways to be creative, to be of use (if that was your thing), to cause trouble (that too), or to accomplish something great and gain recognition from your peers, be they university staff or gamers or simply fans of whatever online persona you had created. Just like real life, cyber-life offered choices. What you chose to do, who you chose to be, might determine your cyber-destiny. This was one of the key realizations that dawned on PLATO users. There was not just one path. There were many. If you didn’t like one Ziggurat, you could go find an
other, or even start your own, then climb to the top, to join that special few at the very top, or to be the one.

  This was the great invention at the dawn of the information age: pyramids of achievement, of respect, of accomplishment, of financial success, of notoriety, of celebrity, can only hold so many people at the top, so, invent more pyramids, and let people spread out and climb the ones best for them. At UI and other universities connected to the CERL PLATO system, as more and more students were assigned coursework that included required PLATO terminal usage, as more and more students with a technical bent found out it was possible to get paid to use this thing—and not just university students, but high school students from the surrounding area as well—the wave of young people pouring into PLATO grew. They couldn’t all be “s” programmers. They were going to have to prove their stuff to Blomme, Tenczar, Sherwood, and the others. Every day it was getting harder. There needed to be more paths to glory. Now there were.

  Some of these paths were more glorious than others. One easy path, true low-hanging fruit for a new author eager to make a mark once he or she finagled some lesson space and learned a little bit of TUTOR, was to create an index, a directory, of other lessons, notesfiles, games, and whatnot. These indexes had their equivalent when the World Wide Web started twenty years later: out of nowhere, they popped up like weeds. The more ambitious of the index makers strove to add more features and conveniences as time went on, anything to attract and then retain users who were free to go elsewhere (Yahoo would wind up owning the spot at the top of the early Web directory Ziggurat). On PLATO, there were programs like “bigjump” and “llist” and countless others all essentially offering the same thing: directories of interesting things to do online.

  —

  One’s identity on PLATO started with one’s signon. A PLATO signon consisted of two parts: a name and a group. The closest analog today is one’s email address, with the name to the left of the @ sign, and some Internet domain to the right. As befits a computer world that had evolved off on its own with similar but different solutions for everything, the separator on PLATO was not “@” but a slash “/” to separate name from group.