GoKawiilImagine you’re Ray Ozzie, born half a decade after Turing outlined his Test to see if a machine is truly intelligent. You’re lucky enough to attend a high school with ARPA funding, ARPA of internet forerunner ARPANET fame, with Teletypes connected to time sharing mainframes, with a teacher looking for volunteers to figure out how to use the thing.
FORTRAN was finalized when you were two. And now, in high school, you’re coding in FORTRAN and Basic in downtime at school, a string of words that would have been nonsensical a few years prior. Logic would have you major in Electrical Engineering; luck would place you at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. And UICI was where everything from the first eBook to the first graphical browser, Mosaic, would be invented.
Coding was manual, tedious, in those late-1970’s days. “In my classes, we were using card decks. We were having to ... write out our machine problems on paper,” Ozzie reminisced with me on a call, then “right into the key punch, submit our decks, and get our lists back.”
“Directly across the street, there was this room with all these orange screens, with people doing things,” said Ozzie. “I had to figure out what was going on, and managed to wrangle an account on the system.”
PLATO, it turned out, was the orange-and-black system, the University of Illinois’ early educational computer. By day, programming was painstakingly hand-coded. By night, “at 10PM ‘till 6AM,” said Ozzie, here was this computer of the future. “People were just using it for all these wacky things.”
“Online community. There was an early form of email called personal notes. Discussions. There was a thing called Talkomatic, which was essentially online real time chat a character at a time—not line at a time. No matter what you were doing, you could press an escape button, it would open up a little box on the bottom of the screen and you could type in who you wanted to talk to. There was a special account called Consult where you could share your screen, and they could see what you were doing and talk to you while you were doing it.”
“It was all of this online interaction,” described Ozzie, at a time when the majority of people had never touched a computer.
So imagine Ozzie and friends’ shock when they graduated and went into industry, only to discover that the future was far from evenly distributed. “We were just shocked at the lack of use of the computer as a communications device,” he recalled. You could have taken that as a given, that industry was doomed to stay behind the state of the art. Or you could take that as a mission, to bring the state of the art to the masses. Slowly, over weekends, a plan came together. You’d seen the future, and knew you had to do your part to make it more equally distributed. And so, Ozzie along Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell, friends from the University of Illinois, set out to build the future that David Wooley’s Notes had shown on the PLATO computer.
“It wasn’t like I had a choice, you know?” said Ozzie. “I had to do it. Because it was just super compelling, and everybody was ignoring it.”
Inventing while the paint’s still wet
... continue reading