Where Wizards Stay Up Late (26 page)

Crowther finished the program over the course of three or four weekends. His kids—ages seven and five—loved it, and Crowther began showing it to friends. But the breakup of his marriage had sapped Crowther's spirit, and he never got around to refining the game.

Bob Taylor, now director of the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, persuaded first Severo Ornstein, then Will Crowther, to join him, and when Crowther moved to California in 1976 he left the Adventure program behind in a file on a BBN computer. Unpolished though the game was, word of Adventure had filtered through the network community.

A Stanford graduate student named Don Woods heard about Adventure from a friend who had run across a copy on the Stanford Medical School computer, and he downloaded the game from there. But Woods had difficulty getting Adventure to run at first, and when he did he found it riddled with bugs. Still, he was hooked. “Adventure made users feel like they were interacting more with the computer,” said Woods. “It seemed to be responding more to what you typed, rather than just making its own moves like a silent opponent. I think this attracted a lot of players who might otherwise have been turned off by the idea of playing ‘against' a computer. This was playing ‘with'a computer.”

The game listed Will Crowther as the author, and Woods decided to track down Crowther to get the source code so he could start making repairs to the rudimentary little program. He sent e-mail to every host on the network looking for Crowther, and finally he found him at PARC. Crowther happily handed over the code. It took several months to rework, during which the simple program doubled in size. Woods created new obstacles, added a pirate, twisted the mazes further, and added several treasures that required some problem solving before they were found.

When Adventure was done, Woods created a guest account on the computer at the Stanford AI Lab to let people play, and swarms of guests logged in. Adventure spread like hula hoops, as people sent the program to one another over the network. Because Crowther had written it in FORTRAN, it could be adapted to many different computers with relative ease. Both Crowther and Woods encouraged programmers to pirate the game and included their e-mail addresses for anyone looking for help installing, playing, or copying the game.

People grew bleary-eyed searching for treasure into the small hours of the morning. ”I've long ago lost count of the programmers who've told me that the experience that got them started using computers was playing Adventure,” Woods said. The game inspired hundreds of knockoffs, which eventually spawned an entire industry.

Adventure demonstrated the appeal of an open networking culture. And the emphasis on openness grew with time. There were few closed doors on the network, and a free spirit prevailed in people's attitudes about who could come and go through them, and for what purposes. Anyone trying to restrict the graduate student population from freely using the network would have grossly misunderstood the mind-set of the computer science community. The
ARPANET
was official federal government property, but network mail was being used for all manner of daily conversation.

Then, in the spring of 1977, Quasar rolled in the door. Its arrival marked the beginning of the first debate over free speech in cyberspace. The controversy centered on an unusual device made by Quasar Industries and blew up into an argument over using the taxpayer-funded
ARPANET
to speak, in openly critical terms, about a private company.

The brainchild of Quasar Industries, the device stood five feet four inches and weighed two hundred forty pounds. It was called the Domestic Android robot, a programmable helper that could perform a dozen basic household tasks such as mopping the floor, mowing the lawn, washing dishes, and serving cocktails. It came equipped with a personality and speech, so that it could “interact in any human situation.” It could “teach the kids French” and “continue teaching them, while they sleep.” At the advertised price of $4,000, the thing seemed a steal.

Phil Karlton of Carnegie-Mellon was the first to alert the Msg-Group, on May 26, 1977. His site on the
ARPANET
was heavily involved in exploring artificial intelligence, speech recognition, and related research problems, so he knew a thing or two about robots. The android and its inventor had attracted a fair amount of national press attention, most of it favorable. Quasar's sales pitch had also caught the attention of
Consumer Reports,
which ran a skeptical item on it in the June issue, just out.

At first Quasar seemed nothing but an amusing diversion from the MsgGroup's main business. Everyone in the group knew the thing was a hoax, and for a while that seemed enough. But then a sense of civic duty arose. Dave Farber told of being in Boca Raton, Florida, and hearing on the radio that the Dade County police department was considering purchasing a Quasar guard robot for their county jail, for $7,000. In March the
Boston Globe
ran a story quoting MIT's Marvin Minsky and other skeptical AI experts. But the article took the overall attitude, said a MsgGroup member, that it “just goes to show you, those academicians can't do anything practical, and all you need is some guy working in the back of a garage to put them to shame.” The saga left a trail of disbelief in the artificial intelligence research community.

Brian Reid and a colleague, Mark Fox, from the Carnegie-Mellon Artificial Intelligence Lab, posted an offbeat report to everyone in the MsgGroup, giving them a personal account of their inspection of the domestic robot, “Sam Strugglegear,” at a large department store in downtown Pittsburgh. People in the research community, knowing of CMU's pioneering AI work, had been calling the Lab to ask how it was possible for Quasar's robot to be so much better at speech recognition than anything CMU had produced. Rising to the challenge, a four-member team from CMU had done the fieldwork.

“They found a frightening sight,” reported Reid and Fox. In the men's department, among the three-piece suits, was a five-feet-two-inch “aerosol can on wheels, talking animatedly” to a crowd. Electric motors and a system of gears moved the device's arms. The robot seemed conversant on any subject, recognized the physical features of customers, and moved freely in any direction. The crowd was charmed.

But the scientists were skeptical. They looked around for some evidence of a remote controller. “Lo and behold, about ten feet from the robot, standing in the crowd, we found a man in a blue suit with his hand held contemplatively to his mouth like Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer in the famous Rembrandt painting.” Reid and the others watched for awhile and noticed that whenever the robot was talking, so was the man in the blue suit—muttering into his hand. The man had a wire dangling suspiciously from his waist.

The discussion about the Quasar robot continued on and off for a couple of years until in early 1979, Einar Stefferud, the MsgGroup's moderator, and Dave Farber, who had been lurking on the sidelines of the commentary, sent a note of caution to the MsgGroup. “We are asking for potential problems,” they warned, “when we criticize the Quasar robot.” Using U.S. Government facilities to cast aspersions on a corporation, they said, could backfire on the ARPA research community. They urged their peers to impose careful self-censorship, to report only facts of technical interest to the community. Not everyone agreed, and with that the MsgGroup got embroiled in a soul-searching exchange.

John McCarthy, who worked at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, was among those most offended by Quasar's claims. He told the group that he would not be deterred by speculation that Quasar might sue. “I think someone seems to be frightened of his shadow,” McCarthy said. “It has never been the custom of carnival snake-oil salesmen to sue their critics.” Minsky and Reid also made it clear that they would tell any reporter who asked that they believed the robot was a joke, and they'd already expressed that opinion to more than a dozen journalists.

“I have no fear of being sued,” replied Farber. “However, we are using a public vehicle called the
ARPANET
. We thereby expose ARPA, DOD, and our future access and use of the network to certain dangers when we use that vehicle for potentially libelous material.” Farber again urged restraint.

Reid chimed in, saying, “[the] MsgGroup is the closest that we have to a nationwide computer science community forum.” Reid had begun to notice that the Message Group was like a social club. They had argued with each other so much that they had become friends. To restrict discussion would be unnatural. Besides, Reid took a more liberal view of free speech, reasoning that the experiment in communications would suffer if topics were restricted. “Until such time as people start suggesting the overthrow of our government,” he said, “I don't think any sensible topic should be off limits.”

Someone suggested attaching a disclaimer to personal communications on the
ARPANET
so that personal opinions wouldn't be mistaken for official business. Admitted someone else, “Who hasn't used Net mail for personal communication? Who hasn't spent time playing some new game over the Net? Be honest.” The passion in defense of free speech was matched by an equally strong will to self-protection; the way to protect the network itself was not to attract unwanted supervision by the government. After a few days the argument wore itself out without resolution and the MsgGroup carried on with business as usual.

What emerged from the debate was strong evidence that the networking community felt a deep stake in the creation of the Net, ARPA funding or no ARPA funding, and was trying jealously to guard its right to determine its future. In a realm where, in a sense, personal identity is defined entirely by the words people choose, free speech seemed second only to concern for the survival of the realm itself.

For the first quarter of 1976, traffic reports showed that the volume of
ARPANET
mail, compared to the volume of regular U.S. mail, was a mere ant trail in the tracks of an elephant herd. MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, for example, passed some 9,925 messages during the period. (By 1996, by comparison, some sites were processing 150,000 e-mail messages every day.) MIT was a typical site, and by extrapolation, if one machine processed about a hundred pieces of e-mail a day, multiplied by a factor of 98 or so (the number of hosts then on the Net) electronic mail didn't yet appear to pose a threat to the U.S. postal system. The post office handled more than 50 billion pieces of first-class mail a year. But e-mail's steep growth curve wasn't going unnoticed.

In the private sector, companies were poised for the concept of electronic-mail service to take off. The Computer Corporation of America soon began selling one of the first commercially available e-mail software packages, a $40,000 product called
COMET
, designed for the PDP-11 minicomputer. Another program called
MESSENGER
, developed for IBM 360 and 370 computers, was soon available from a company called On-Line Software International, for $18,000. Costs were heading down, and some analysts projected a “devastating” impact on the U.S. Postal Service's first-class business.

“We are being bypassed technologically,” reported an assistant U.S. postmaster general at the beginning of 1976. The new technology's growth trend and obvious potential were indeed quite dramatic. A few versions of the more sophisticated
ARPANET
mail programs such as
MSG
,
HERMES
, and SRI's
NLS JOURNAL MAIL
, were coming into the hands of nonresearchers. Several large organizations including the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of Commerce, National Security Agency, and Gulf Oil had all started using e-mail over local area networks.

The government was looking closely at the future of e-mail service. A report for the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy by the consulting firm Arthur D. Little estimated that 30 percent of all first-class mail was likely to be sent electronically within a few years. The postal service reacted to that prediction by awarding RCA a $2.2 million contract to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of providing e-mail service. In its report, RCA argued for adding e-mail to the post office's services. A USPS advisory panel also took a close look. They recommended making a “firm and continuing commitment” to electronic mail, on a par with NASA's manned space program.

Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign used e-mail several times a day in the autumn of 1976. The system they were using was a basic mailbox program, a technology already more than a decade old. But for a political campaign this was a revolutionary stroke in communications. On that basis, Carter was labeled the “computer-driven candidate.”

By 1979, President Carter was supporting a post office proposal to offer a limited kind of electronic message service to the nation. The hybrid scheme worked more like a telegram service than a state-of-the-art electronic communications system. Messages would be transmitted electronically between post offices overnight, then delivered to recipients'doorsteps the next day. The proposal was remarkable mainly for how cautious it seemed in view of the technological possibilities.

Stefferud and others in the MsgGroup—the community with the most experience with e-mail—immediately saw the flaws in the U.S. Postal Service's plan, which involved converting messages from digital electronic media to paper and then delivering them by hand as you would ordinary mail. Not only would this approach cost more than e-mail, but it would never be fast enough to compete with e-mail as long as it depended on USPS's traditional foot power for those final steps to the mailbox. Desktop computers “will make the perfect mailbox,” Stefferud predicted, and would bypass the post office entirely. An analogy could be drawn to the once farcical notion of automated garbage collection, which was unthinkable until the invention of the “electric pig,” the early name given to the in-sink disposal. “The key is not in automating the bag/can/truck/ person mechanism,” Stefferud said. “It is in bypassing them altogether.”