Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Oh - and the chance to create a game on a very high-resolution (for
the time) graphical screen, with 250 millisecond or better response
time to keypresses, and a method for shared memory that made
multiplayer games relatively easy to implement, didn't hurt any.
  

    
I think now know what it must've felt like for Woody Allen when, in ANNIE
HALL, he was standing in line outside the movie theatre, debating
some points with others in line, when he suddenly pulls Marshall 
McLuhan himself into the frame and gets him to engage in the discussion.

Thanks Dave, for visiting this conference and chiming in! :-)
  

    

You're absolutely right about 's' and 'p' at CERL -- I was thinking
about the distinction CDC and CDC-related systems made between 's'
and 'p'.  (I personally never made it to 's' at CDC or at
university-related PLATO systems; I got as far as 'p' -- they
wouldn't allow anyone to have 's'.)

I now recall that there was a sign somewhere in CERL where a lot
of the 'p' people worked -- something along the lines of "Junior
Systems Programmers: We Program Junior Systems".
  

    
This is great. So good to have both of you in storytelling mode. Thanks 
for stopping by, David.
  

    
When you guys talk about multiplayer games using PLATO -- how many
players are we talking about?  And how remote?
  

    
How many players:  Well, Avatar racked up about 600,000 hours of use
between September 1978 and May 1985. If you do the math, that works out
to an average of 10.4 people playing Avatar at any given time of the
day or night during that 6 1/2 year period. Of course there were peak
times, probably in the evenings and into the wee hours of the morning,
when I imagine there'd be a several dozen players on. 

This is just for one of the many games on PLATO, and only for the CERL
PLATO system at the U of Illinois -- which probably accounted for
about a quarter of PLATO usage worldwide.

As for how remote, the bulk of the terminals connected to the CERL
system were at various locations around the U of Illinois campuses in
Champaign-Urbana and Chicago, but there were terminals connected to
that system scattered here and there in other places around the
country. I believe University of Delaware had some terminals connected
to CERL before they acquired their own PLATO system, for example.
  

    

Right.  There were a number of universities with terminals connected to
CERL.  Some of them, like Delaware, and the Univ of Hawaii, eventually got
their own PLATO systems.  Others, like Cornell and Stanford, just kept
a connection to CERL.

People would dial into CERL from all over the U.S. and Canada, and in time
from Europe and Australia and Israel and South Africa as well.  Quickly,
Control Data began installing systems around the world, but the mother of
all PLATO systems was always CERL.  It's no wonder so many people made
"pilgrimages" (their term!) to the U of I to visit CERL and meet the PLATO
folks face-to-face.

As for how many users in the games:

Avatar is notable because it supported more simultaneous users than most
PLATO games.  I believe it was 60, versus 30 for Empire.  It all came down
to scarce memory and disk resources, and some built-in limits of the
system.  The Avatar authors had the benefit of about 5 years of solid
learnings by other game authors by the time they started building Avatar,
which became a huge coding effort over a period of years starting around 1978.  
I remember signing on to CERL in the evenings in 1980, and Avatar would be 
maxed out, 60 people in the game and you'd have to wait until someone exited
before you could get in.  It was a long wait, because people stayed in for
hours, or when they did exit, someone else beat you to it when a slot opened up.

While 30 or 60 players seems downright quaint by World of Warcraft or
EverQuest standards, bear in mind that these PLATO games were absolutely
state-of-the-art at the time -- no-one else in the entire world offered
a platform that could handle games of this size all running at the same
time on the same system.  

I am still amused and somewhat amazed at how many millions of contact hours
on PLATO were games rather than educational lessons.  I have document after
document showing that, from about 1976 onwards, games were either #1 or 
in the top 5 of the programs that consumed the most contact hours on PLATO.
Empire was usually #1, but they'd downplay that when the brass from the 
funding agencies was looking in on their baby.
  

    
And over a third of the contact hours were in Notes, according to the
statistics I've got.
  

    
The tragedy of it all - or the humorous irony, depending on how you
look at it - is that Control Data really didn't understand what it had
on its hands. PLATO was marketed as an educational system, and that's
all the executives could see. What it really wanted to be was a social
network and multiplayer gaming platform. Control Data could have ridden
that wave and had a 10-year jump on everyone else. Instead, they sank.
  

    
You talk about "Dr Graper" and his having his own notesfile - I
realise these metaphors are difficult to transfer but is this in any
way analogous to his having a homepage or .plan file? And did this
predate the finger/.plan concept? If so could one say blogging started
with PLATO?
  

    
(derb), excellent question.  

When one looks back now and studies the behaviors and activities of
the user community on PLATO, one can see many behaviors and activities
that people would exhibit later.

If the tools are there -- social media tools -- PLUS, there's an
appreciative audience for whatever you create with the tools, then
by golly you start using the tools to create interesting things, and
all kinds of interesting stuff happens as a result.

With Dave Graper, he had no big idea about Blogging or something like
that, he had an urge to write, found a place he could write, and then,
his writings got noticed by others, especially a guy named Bill Lynch,
who worked in the Music Building and had programmed a lot of the
amazing Delaware music lessons.  (Graper often hung out in the terminal
room at the Music Building, which, by the way, was where I first
discovered PLATO, wondering what was in this darkened room with 
people sitting in front of screens glowing orange).

Lynch started collecting Graper's writings and found a notesfile for
him and after that, Graper started posting everything in the notesfile
(though occasionall would post elsewhere, for example, =staffnotes=
and the UDDATA material).  

In the big picture, sure, if tools called "blogs" had been in existence,
what Graper was doing would absolutely have been called a blog.  And
it's too bad there wasn't a way to monetize back then, because he had
so many readers he would have made a tidy little sum.
  

    

Now, another phenomenon on PLATO -- and another early net.celebrity --
which we've so far not talked about needs to be discussed at this point.
The phenomenon I refer to is known by various names, including The Red
Sweater News Service, or simply, News Report.  And the guy responsible
for it is a true character, The Red Sweater (aka Bruce Parello).

Bruce was a Univ of Illinois student who like so many others in the early 
to mid 70s, stumbled on PLATO and got hooked.  Bruce was another in a 
long line of rather eccentric individuals who became a fixture in the 
PLATO community: every day he wore the same red sweater, I mean EVERY 
single day, every month, all seasons, whether it was cold as hell out or 
hot as blazes.  He'd carry a briefcase and he only, ONLY, would drink 
Orange Fanta soft drink.  Nothing else would do (he told me it was 
allergies and Fanta was the only thing he could tolerate).  There's
a famous anecdote of the time another PLATO programmer at CERL came 
in to work during early morning hours, and discovered Bruce hiding in 
his darkened office, whereupon Bruce begged him for help in finding 
his sweater.  Turns out some pranksters took his sweater out of
the washing machine or dryer and hid it, and Bruce freaked out.

Around 1973 he created what I would argue was not only the first real 
blog, but also the first online newspaper: News Report.

News Report was even structured like a blog: new individual postings 
every day, when the older postings pushed back to archives.  While the 
postings were mostly about the news (Bruce would sit and read the 
newspaper in the morning, then write up his commentary on the news for 
News Report), in time the postings started covering other things like 
concert reviews, Star Trek, and fictional stories, like the detective 
series called Specs Nookno, Private Eye (-specs nookno- being a TUTOR 
command meaning don't provide an automatic "ok" or "no" at a prompt on 
the screen where the user typed in text and pressed NEXT).  Other authors 
started contributing to News Report as well -- just like multi-author 
blogs.  Bruce's political rants were apparently quite hilarious and 
always controverial -- him being a conservative in the Nixon/Ford era.

A story in a local publication in 1975 profiled Bruce and News Report, 
and says there were 20,000 readers.

As is always the case, when an online publication gets successful and
spawns multiple authors all contributing creative work, in time the
thing just scales beyond its capacity.  And such was the case with 
News Report.  A guy named Bill Roper came up with an idea for a huge,
rambling fictional story involving "supreme being" of group "p",
and a PLATO user named Bill who gets sucked into the PLATO terminal
and winds up as a little tiny character on the screen, screaming for
help.  The story was huge, involving a then un-heard-of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, and Bruce said it was too big for News Report.  So Bill
found some file space of his own (always a challenge) and so launched
=guanogap=, The Great Guano Gap story.  

Guano Gap is for sure the first example of interactive fiction.

If you want to see =guanogap=, it has been painstakingly restored on 
the Cyber1.org service.
  

    

Here's a write up by John Daleske (one of the co-authors of EMPIRE)
who led the "restoration" effort in 2008 to bring Guano Gap back to
life (I wish he'd asked because I had the source code in digital
form already, and he didn't know, just had a printout, and manually
typed everything in!  eeek!):

    What connects a war, an online computer community, religion,
    and hacker/gamers?  "The Great Guano Gap"

    In 1975 on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois
    Champaign-Urbana a unique new "lesson" appeared, -guanogap-.
    It was the creation of an entirely new storytelling genre,
    the simulation of an online community ON the system on
    which the community existed, adding the fantasy of a new
    character.

    As important, -guanogap- captured a snapshot of the online
    community in 1975, the group notes, the pnotes, how the
    communication interactively happened, the growth of the
    alternative (gaming) community, and the systems people.


One thing John drives home that is so important and has been so 
helpful for me in the digital archaeologist role is that Guano 
Gap reproduced many of the screens, exactly how they looked, 
for common PLATO programs in that era: notesfiles, personal notes,
the Author Mode, TERM-talk, monitor mode (I still get a chuckle whenever
I see "supreme being of p also sees this display" at the bottom of the
screen in Guano Gap -- the kind of message a user would see when they'd
invited another user to monitor their screen), and the Users List.

It's as if someone had taken a movie camera and gone around CERL and
filmed a fictional story within CERL -- set aside the fiction for a 
moment, but what is valuable to the archaeologist is the FOOTAGE of
CERL!  In this case, we have some footage of PLATO as it looked during
the golden (er, orange) era.
  

    
Just ran across a paragraph on wikipedia that reminded me of
an aspect of PLATO culture that I had completely forgotten:
emoticons, in widespread use long before Scott Fahlman
invented :-).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#Pre-1980_emoticons

What made this work is that everyone on the system was using the
exact same output device, which supported backspacing and
character superposition.  Many users, including myself, had
our own personal character graphics that we used to sign our
notes.
  

    

Thanks for mentioning that (jef)!  I did a write up on PLATO
emoticons a while back, and included a bunch of actual screen
shots:

   <http://platopeople.com/emoticons.html>

At the time the terminal emulation software I was using showed
stuff in blue rather than PLATO-orange, hence the odd color if
you go look at that page.  Be that as it may, look closely at
the emoticons and note how richer and more complex they were
than the simple ASCII stuff that came later.

It's an evolutionary tale I think even Darwin would have appreciated
-- more complex creatures that thrived in one environment only to die 
off in the long run, replaced by far simpler creatures that adapted to a 
wider set of environments and thrives to this day.
  

    

Oh, and I should mention that one of the most creative designers
of not only emoticons on PLATO, but more importantly, animated
emoticons, was none other than The Red Sweater.  If you look
closely on the screen shots, you'll see lots of references to
"--rs" -- that's the initials for Red Sweater.
  

    
And by the way, the Red Sweater has apparently adapted to 21st century
technology and is now blogging under the guise of Conservative Cat:
http://www.conservativecat.com
  

    

Ha!  RS has a blog!  That is perfect.
  

    

Another fun story from 1973.  The day when the Nixon White House
threatend to shut down PLATO *and* ARPANET.

In October of 73, a grad student named Stuart Umpleby posted a note in a 
lesson called "discuss" (one of numerous early conferencing programs 
written before the official PLATO Notes had expanded beyond Help Notes, 
System Announcements, and Public Notes), on the subject of whether or
not Nixon should be impeached.  It was right after the famous Saturday 
Night Massacre at the White House, where numerous administraiton people 
were fired or resigned.  Umpleby, who shall we say did not like Nixon,
thought it was time to impeach the President.

As was Umpleby's wont, he not only posted his article in "discuss" on
PLATO, but found an ARPANET terminal on the Illinois campus and typed
his question in there on the FORUM site, which was an experimental 
message forum run by the Institute for the Future.  As people would 
reply on either FORUM or discuss, he would transcribe their postings
onto the other system so that both PLATO and ARPANET had essentially
the same thread going.

Well, the discussion naturally grew and Umpleby started advocating for
using PLATO and ARPANET to not only *discuss* the idea of impeachment,
but also to spread the word about rallies on campuses around the 
country.

So that's all going on in late October.

At the same time, Donald Bitzer is about to go make a speech at the
Univ of Pennsylvbania in Philly.  He's in his hotel room about to leave
and he gets a panicked phone call from the DOD.  The gist of the 
conversation is that the Nixon White House just called DOD, furious, 
asking what the hell was going on with their computer networks being used 
to advocate impeachment of the President.  Then the phone rings again.  
Now it's the NSF brass.  The White House was screaming at them too.  The 
message was clear: stop this activity IMMEDIATELY or the White House is 
going to shut down ARPANET and PLATO and kill all funding.

Bitzer, always the ultimate Mr. Cool, says fine, lemme look into it and 
find out what's going on.  He calls CERL, talks to Bruce Sherwood, hears 
about Umpleby.  Rather than kill the conversation, he advises Sherwood to 
tell the discussion participants that given the PLATO system's 
educational mandate, anything discussed online that would be a perfectly 
reasonable discussion in a proper classroom setting among professor and 
students was fine.  Anything that was advocacy and using the system to 
actually plan and promote political rallies or demonstrations was not.
So the "discuss" conversation stayed, and continued, minus the advocacy.

Umpleby lost his ARPANET account and was pretty much banned from ARPANET.

This may be the first instance of government censorship for online 
content.

In the book I'll go into much more detail about this incident including 
offering quotes from the actual "discuss" forum and Bitzer's subsequent 
posting on the forum.
  

    
>It's an evolutionary tale I think even Darwin would have appreciated
>-- more complex creatures that thrived in one environment only to die 
>off in the long run, replaced by far simpler creatures that adapted to a 
>wider set of environments and thrives to this day.

Fascinating comment
  

    
I don't want to discourage further PLATO memories, but I also want to 
acknowledge where we are at present, as well. In a few days this 
discussion will wind down, so I want to make a brief leap to NOW during 
our remaining time.

Brian, you have had an interesting and varied career since your time 
working on PLATO, but the current company, which has been around for 
several years now, seems as nicely tied to where we are today, as PLATO to 
its time.

I'm talking about "Eventful", which I still think of as a "public 
calendar" service. Why did you start such a company at this time? Describe 
its successes and strengths and where its going.

(Welcome to all who are now reading along without logging in.  You're
invited to join us if you like, or you may simply email a question or
comment for Brian Dear, for posting here.  Send it to inkwell@well.com
-- please include "PLATO" in the subject line.)
  

    

I started Eventful originally as EVDB.  The name stood for Events and
Venues Database, inspired by IMDB and CDDB.  I originally had the idea
in 1994 to do an online events alert service, for music, book-related,
and lecture-type events.  Couldn't get funding for it then, so I shelved
the idea and went off to various other companies until 2002.

In 2002 I dusted the idea off again, after noticing how frustrating it
had gotten to try to keep up with what was going on in town in terms of
interesting events.  I also wanted to do the Demand service, which I 
started thinking about in 1999 and blogged about in 2002/2003.  I was
frustrated to find out about cool events I might have gone to, or I knew
people who would have loved to go to, but we simply DIDN'T KNOW in time,
or only found out after the fact.

For instance, Google engineers were coming to UCSD giving public lectures
about the Google infrastructure.  I woulda been there, but UCSD's 
Engineering Dept thought "announcement of a public event" amounted
to putting a flyer on the bulletin board next to the elevator.

From 2002-2004 I was working full-time on the book, but had an itch to do
a startup, and EVDB was what kept coming up as the opportunity to pursue.
I wanted to call the company Eventful, but eventful.com was owned by a
domain squatting company and they wanted $888.00 for the domain and I 
was too cheap to buy it.  (Later, when I got VC money, I decided to buy
the domain.  The price had risen to $10,000.00.  Best investment the 
company ever made.)

The idea was a service like Wikipedia, IMDB, and CDDB, where the public
contributed content to public databases, and a platform of API's was 
available so tons of apps could be built on any platform to enable 
searching and finding events you were interested in as well as events
your friends were interested in.

The Demand service was taking search one level further.  Imagine if on
Google, you did a search for a document you weren't sure existed.  And
say it doesn't exist.  Well, imagine if Google offered an option to 
DEMAND that that document exist.  That was what Eventful Demand was
about for events: your desired event was not scheduled to happen in your
town, but so what -- go ahead and start a campaign to DEMAND that the
event happen in your town.  Whether the event is a concert, lecture,
book signing, celebrity appearance, film screening, political rally,
any sort of event.  

The EVDB website rolled out in March 2005, and in September 2005 I 
got the domain the site became eventful.com.  In March 2006 eventful.com
began offering the Eventful Demand service.  

I brought in an MBA to run the company in 2006 and have remained chairman
of the board.  We're now at 13 million registered users and are growing 
fast.

The latest big thing on Eventful was the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movie
which 1.3 million people demanded film screenings for -- we got a ton of
print and media coverage for that.  A few weeks ago we announced a deal
with Ryan Seacrest Productions, and he's currently doing a demand to 
bring some American Idol winners to the most-demanded-city for a free
concert.
  

    
Does Eventful cover the entire wired world or just the US? One of the 
difficulties I have had with public calendaring on my website is that many 
of the events people tell me about happen in other countries (and need to 
be described--if to be attended by locals--in languages other than English 
or alphabets other than Latin)?
  

    

At any time there are about 4-5 million events in the system.  A goodly
chunk are in North America, but another big chunk is outside US,
particularly Europe and Australia.  The events are predominantly listed
in English, but many non-U.S. users list their events in their original
language.  The system uses UTF-8 characters so events can be listed in
any major world language including non-Latin languages.  The system also
crawls the web looking for events, which is a real pain because there's 
no agreement on a standard for describing events in a structured way on
the web (the iCalendar format is painfully inadequate for a detailed 
listing, as it was intended primarily for office meetings in a business
environment).  So what we have is a messy, instructured web full of
really messy event listings (just take a look at Craigslist for 
instance), and almost no willingness to fix the problem.  It will be
fixed in time, but I still think it's years off.
  

    
Sounds like a good reason to use microformats for events - still limited, 
but moving in the right direction.

What is your user community like. 4-5 current events - posted by how many 
people? viewed by how many people?

Are you screen scraping from applications like MySpace and Facebook?