by Brian Dear
CERL’s community now resembled a bustling, busy, large town, a microcosm of today’s Internet. There one could behold the full gamut of human drama: sharing experiences and opinions, hopes, and fears, debating and arguing, laughing and crying, and everything that a human life is exposed to—birth, youth, relationships, dating, marriage, having kids, divorce, illness, and death. Death was a particularly new phenomenon for a virtual community to handle, particularly the death of a well-known, well-liked CERL staffer, Walter Brooks, whose signon like so many others had been a familiar sight online on the Users List. Brooks, one of CERL’s system operators and a programmer at a local PLATO software company, was heading to work one day on his motorcycle and was fatally hit by a truck. The local community was shocked; grief poured out in notesfiles online. Some users, who knew Brooks only through his online self and had never met him face-to-face, flocked to PLATO to share their loss and exchange feelings with others. Today, when someone well known dies millions of people fill social media with messages of sympathy, grief, and hashtags. When someone died in PLATO’s virtual community, it was an utterly new, unfamiliar experience that the community had to figure out how to handle. When Brian Larson, a well-known student PLATO programmer at CERL, took his own life in 1986, the community reeled in distress at the tragedy, creating almost immediately a notesfile, =briannote=, to share grief, memories, and, in many cases, anger at Larson’s suicide. Before doing the deed, Larson had not only sent private pnotes to numerous people, but he had posted a defiant suicide note in a public notesfile, stating that he refused to be a part of society. People from all over the campus, many of them fellow students, posted messages in =briannote=, many with questions asking “why.” At the funeral a few days later, the church was filled with people, many of whom only knew Larson from his online presence.
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Many of the extraordinary, unexpected outcomes produced by PLATO IV were thanks to the new wave of kids who had not been turned away thanks to the open, welcoming atmosphere of CERL and the PLATO system itself.
There was another unexpected outcome. At some point, a point that varied depending on the person, PLATO became more than a novelty in the lives of its more obsessed users. These users would cross an invisible line beyond which being on PLATO became one’s life. There were countless examples of this. One was Mark Eastom, says Bruce Maggs, one of the authors of Avatar. Maggs roomed with Eastom during one of his undergraduate years, and Eastom became one of Avatar’s operators, contributing by managing the monster data. “He was a real character,” says Maggs. “PLATO was his life, he was one of these guys for whom this was it. This was all they had in their lives: their PLATO programming and PLATO game playing and PLATO friendships. There were a lot of people like that.”
Living the PLATO life could turn into an addiction, a dangerous path to take. A PLATO-addicted college student risked grades suffering, possibly delaying graduation, or, worse, expulsion or dropping out. All of these outcomes were, sadly, commonplace.
It did not help that Don Bitzer himself had such a relaxed view on the gaming craze (gamers would argue otherwise). In 1975, he was interviewed for The Daily Illini, where he predicted that within ten years there would be PLATO-powered gaming parlors around campus, assuring the reporter that “such plans have already been discussed.” He then gave an impromptu demo to the reporter and photographer. “Oh, I see,” he told them with a chuckle, “you want to get a picture that shows the director playing games during illegal hours.” The article finished with Bitzer playing Dogfight:
He chases his partner’s PLATO plane back and forth around the screen, into corners and around in circles, constantly firing and missing with his PLATO bullets.
“Ah, I missed him,” he grumbles, continuing the chase.
“Oh, you rat,” he says.
Suddenly, Bitzer traps his elusive partner. He squirms in his chair, eyes stretched open, head lowered closer to the keyboard, and jabs at the button to blow up his opponent. “Got him!” he cries out.
Who says the games aren’t addictive?
Thing is, they were. The whole system was. And it caused great turbulence to many a college student. When Dave Woolley graduated from Uni High and entered UI as a freshman in 1973, he wanted to study computer science. But that interest died quickly, he says, “because it was all engineering, and for any major in engineering you had to take like three classes in physics. What I was really interested in doing all that time was working on PLATO. That’s really where I got my useful education….I managed to get along. Some people couldn’t handle the balancing act and flunked out….I did all right, I majored in psychology largely because it was easy, didn’t take a lot of concentration.”
Alison McGee was an undergrad out at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and was hooked on PLATO during her college years. “I got the worst grades of my life during those semesters,” she says, “but no regrets. No way, no how.”
Bruce Maggs recalls an experience his mother had while she was riding the bus in Urbana: “She was sitting by some students and one of them said, ‘Are you still in engineering?’ and the other student said, ‘No, I played too much Avatar last semester and had to switch to liberal arts.’ ”
Many UI students from the 1970s and 1980s would in time confess to the havoc PLATO wreaked on their college careers. Michael Schwager was one. “I first saw Plato in 1977,” he says. “I got accepted to the U of I in 1978 and became addicted to it, playing Empire till 6 a.m. In 1979 I flunked out of school, but I got good at PLATO.”
David Sides, one of the coauthors of Avatar, stared into the abyss, grade-wise, a few times thanks to overdoing it on PLATO. “I know I got into a lot of trouble sophomore year, because I was ending up too long at the computer lab, I was there until three or four in the morning, and I had real grade problems that first semester of my sophomore year because of it. I didn’t flunk out of anything, but I got a D in a midterm in chemistry, and that made a real major impression on me, and it was a real problem.”
What made a stronger impression on him was what happened when he borrowed his mother’s Datsun B210. He drove it to CERL, parked, went in, found a terminal, and in moments was down into dungeons gaming. “She had told me to not to come home as late as I had been, which was six or seven or eight in the morning.” He emerged out of CERL into daylight at around eight o’clock, and the car was gone. He called home.
DAVID: Um, Mom, do you have the car?
MOM: Yes, you can walk home.
“I lived on the other side of Champaign,” Sides says. “So that was a memorable experience for me.”
In some PLATO circles, PLATO, partying, and entertainment were the priorities. Ray Ozzie describes his UI undergraduate days as “one big blur” of having fun, partying, gaming, and coding. A far lesser priority was classwork. “Nobody ever wanted to hear ‘I’ve got this in the morning…I’ve got a test.’…You never heard that.”
Steve Rose had enrolled as an electrical engineering freshman, and became a Sigma Phi Delta fraternity pledge in the fall of 1975. “One of the brothers,” Rose says, “was the course director for the mechanical engineering department. He gave me an author so I could play games….I had never seen a computer before and I was hooked.” Rose tried out the usual list of games, but “it was Airfight that really got me,” he says. “I remember many nights spent at CERL playing Airfight until they kicked us out at 6 a.m.” Games or grades: pick one. That was the choice for many students during this time, and in Rose’s case, games won, grades lost. He flunked out after missing many morning classes due to his CERL all-nighters.
Mike Carroll, the creator of the Pad lesson, the simple but popular bulletin board messaging forum on PLATO that was released before David Woolley’s Notes, was another victim. “I would come to school Monday morning and work on it pretty solid until Wednesday evening, when I’d have a date with my girlfriend. Then I’d be back Thursday morning for another session until Friday evening. PLATO went
down every day at 6 a.m. for maintenance, so that’s when I slept. Occasionally I would just fall asleep on the keyboard when the system was shut down, waking up with square keycap indentations in my cheek. I lived on Mountain Dew, KFC chicken livers, and Camel filter cigarettes….Pad was only in existence for a year or so. It faded away in part because I flunked out of college.”
Legendary gamer Brian Blackmore had wanted to go into engineering but lacked certain prerequisites, so entered the college of agriculture for the first year, thinking he could switch majors in the second year. “I basically flunked out of my first year of school because of playing games on PLATO,” he says. “I ended up reapplying a year later, and got into the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the math/CS curriculum. Stuck it out from there, still playing games all the time.”
John Matheny, one of CERL’s junior systems programmers and developer of the Notesfile Sequencer utility, also ran into trouble during his undergraduate years. He took some computer science courses over in the Digital Computer Lab (DCL) across the street from Uni High, and like many students who had been exposed to the Orange Glow of the graphics screen and the snappy responsiveness of PLATO’s Fast Round Trip, he was not impressed with the primitive punch card machines and teletype printers that the purist computer operators DCL forced upon its students. Author Steve Levy once described a similar situation at MIT, where operators of some off-limits big computers were known as “the Priesthood,” those select few allowed to actually touch the mainframe and who made no promises to mere mortals when they submitted their punch card decks seeking computation. Being a PLATO programmer, Matheny decided to do what any sensible PLATO programmer would do. Rather than wasting time with punch card machines and Job Control Language “nonsense” at DCL, he wrote all of his code at a PLATO terminal in the TUTOR editor, then output his code to tape in CERL’s machine room. He then took the tape over, got someone to read it into a tape machine at DCL, and sent the output straight to a punch card machine, which automatically printed out the deck of cards. His professors never knew.
But PLATO consumed so much of Matheny’s time that his academics began to suffer. “I was expelled twice,” he says, “because I was a really poor student, and it was because of PLATO.” He was still on the staff at CERL and kept working over that summer, taking two courses he says he took seriously, and emerged with two A’s. “They didn’t let me back in for another year,” he says, but things began to deteriorate again once he was readmitted. “I was spending all my time at PLATO doing work and none of my time doing coursework and so I got booted again.” He managed to get a job at Control Data Corporation in Minneapolis, and eventually would finish his degree at the University of Minnesota attending night school.
Kevet Duncombe, one of the coauthors of Moria, had a similar situation, out at Iowa State. During an interview he gleefully described the intense time creating Moria. “We’d be up there hackin’ away till all hours,” he said, but when asked how PLATO affected his grades, he got quiet. “Yeah, well,” he said, pausing, “I don’t know,” adding another long pause before admitting, “I eventually flunked out.” He had been at Iowa State for two years, he says, “at which point I was invited to leave.” Being asked to leave one’s undergraduate enrollment was devastating, but losing access to PLATO—being sent back down to the base of the Ziggurat—was equally devastating. Like so many others, he hung around in town, as “they let me keep my signon for a while,” he chuckled. “I was workin’ fast food for a while there, just spending all my free time at the PLATO terminals.” Chuck Miller had graduated, ended up at Control Data in Minneapolis, and one day recommended Kevet for a position. “That was wonderful, that got me my first professional gig. Without it I’d probably still be flipping hamburgers.”
Says one former Uni High student we’ll call Hayden, “When I went to Uni, PLATO gaming was high school, pretty much.” His grades eventually were so poor that Uni asked him to leave. He ended up as a C student at a local public high school. PLATO gaming was the peak experience of his high school years. He made it through a year and a half of college before flunking out. But then something odd happened, similar to Matheny and Duncombe: he discovered that all those years he had invested in PLATO, gaming and hacking and the rest of it, had value after all. “Much to my utter consternation I found I had all these skills that were now being rewarded.” He noticed that many of his contemporaries, Lindsay Reichmann, Mark Zvilius, and some from Urbana High School including Bruce Maggs, Bruce McGinty, and Andrew Shapira, were getting programming jobs, which gave them keys to the building so they could game at night. “I was like,” says Hayden, “well, dang, I oughta get me one of those!” He found work on the side for a professor on campus, and like magic he got a key to the building. “So I could be a gamer again,” he says.
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On today’s Internet, with billions of people connected, it is possible to find a busy, active online community devoted to even the tiniest interest niche one could imagine with forums, support groups, and digital hangouts. With billions of people connected, it is hardly surprising such would be the case. By the late 1970s, though, what CERL’s PLATO system revealed was that with only mere thousands of users (several orders of magnitude less) they had already begun to reflect a similarly vast range of interests.
There was, for instance, a notesfile called =addict=, dedicated to PLATO addiction. In it, users could offer true confessions of their predicament: how PLATO felt to them, how being away from PLATO felt, and how getting back online felt. One user in 1981 described his PLATO experience this way: “When I do get on…blooie….End of sanity. End to sense of proportion. End to perspective on what is important in life. When I first got on in 1975, I used to lay awake at night thinking, ‘Gee, I can’t wait until I get on tomorrow,’ and getting an author signon was the greatest ambition I had.” Another user expressed his PLATO predicament this way: “The orange dots are more personal to me than face-to-face encounters with people I don’t know. This may be because when you leave a note with your signon attached, it is there for a long time, much longer than a spoken word is around, and therefore tends to be more thought out. Those who say computers are impersonal have never used a computer. They are far more personal than most people. P.S. Computer games are better than sex.”
An electrical engineering student who was soon to graduate posted in =addict= asking for help on life after PLATO. “I’m unprepared to face the world,” the anonymous poster said. “What’s it like out there? Is there any way to avoid this?” Less than an hour later, another user replied, suggesting, “Get a fulltime job at the university. In that way, you can still manage to get a PLATO signon. That’s how I’m still on this wonderful system.”
In 1981 a freelance writer named P. Gregory Springer came to CERL to explore PLATO for an article he was writing. Amid shady advertisements for Pseudo Caine (“an ‘incense,’ ” the ad copy teased) and the Buzz Bomb (“mix cool nitrous with warm smoke”), the article appeared in 1982 in High Times magazine, which described itself as being “at the center of the cannabis counterculture since 1974.” An article on the PLATO online community seemed out of place in such a publication until one realized the topic: computer addiction of the PLATO variety. Indeed, for so many users with author signons on the system, their experience was a kind of high, one that once you reached, you never wanted to come down from.
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Ted Nelson may only have been being whimsical when he gave the title “The Cave of PLATO” to his drawing of a PLATO IV terminal in Dream Machines, but nevertheless it was a profound observation on a remarkably ironic situation. Bitzer had named this system PLATO, and his crowning achievement, the PLATO IV terminal with its gas plasma flat panel touch-sensitive graphical display, supporting internal mirrors and microfiche color slide projection, was indeed a cave of sorts, not unlike the cave in Plato’s allegory. And like Plato’s cave, this “cave” was one whose denizens preferred the depictions on its “wall,” rather than the T
echnicolor reality going on outdoors. Not only that, but PLATO could be something you belonged to. Something you experienced with others, side by side or virtually through cyberspace. It was something you did, but it was also a place you could hang out in. Its more obsessed users viewed the actuality of the PLATO experience as dwarfing what one experiences in real life: more interactions, a sense of hyper-accelerated self, poring through content faster than possible in the real world. Like Plato’s cave, the “drawings” on the wall were crude, shadows only, but still PLATO users were undeterred.
For instance, pornography. Another inevitable consequence of bringing a lot of people, particularly young people, together into a virtual space online and then providing a variety of open-ended tools at their disposal to be as creative as possible, is the inevitable arrival of pornography. The true nerds would digitize photos with a camera, then run special software to convert the image into crude orange lines and dots displaying on-screen. It might take agonizing minutes to plot a naked lady, but in 1975 taking minutes to plot a naked lady in the Friendly Orange Glow of PLATO was a thrill around which college students would gather and cheer. There was even a PLATO Pornography Network (PPN), which, given its illicit nature, kept moving from one lesson space to another on the system, popping up like a weed that the authorities would shut down only to discover a copy had been saved and moved to some other file. Michael Gorback had a TUTOR lesson called “gorbackwk” that became infamous for its crude collection of porn images. But it was popular, and he added features to the lesson, including something called “porn-o-matic,” an advice column, and touch screen games. There was even a private Talkomatic-style chat room. (Gorback’s lesson was so well known that one day years later he happened to be walking into a Control Data office in Baltimore, and as soon as they heard his name, they knew who he was because of “gorbackwk.”) At one point, much to the embarrassment of CERL and the University of Illinois, The Daily Illini published a multipage spread featuring screen shots of seedy porn pictures, mostly line drawings that even true cavemen ten thousand years earlier would have dismissed as hopelessly primitive. But it all had to start somewhere.