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With Zork on the market and proving to be a major hit, it was time for Infocom to think about the inevitable sequel. The task of preparing it fell to Dave Lebling. At first glance, it looked straightforward enough. He needed only take the half of the original PDP-10 Zork that had not made it into the PC version, label it Zork II, and be done with it. In actuality, however, it was a little more complicated. The new game would at a minimum have to have some restructuring. For example, the goal of the PDP-10 Zork, like the PC version, was to deliver a collection of treasures to the white house outside of which the player started the game. Yet in Zork II said house would not exist. Perhaps motivated at first largely by necessity, Lebling began to tinker with the original design. Soon, inspired by the new ZIL technology Infocom had developed to let them port Zork to the PC, technology that was actually more flexible, more powerful, and simpler to work with than the MDL behind the original Zork, Lebling began to dramatically reshape the design, interspersing elements from the original with new areas, puzzles, and characters. In the end, he would use only about half of the leftover PDP-10 material, which in turn would make up about half of Zork II; the other half would be new. Lebling thus became the first implementer to consciously craft an Infocom game, for sale as a commercial product on PCs.

To the outside world, Infocom now began to establish the corporate personality that people would soon come to love almost as much as their games — a chummy, witty inclusiveness that made people who bought the games feel like they had just signed up for a “smart persons club.” Rather than one of the Zork creators or even one of the Infocom shareholders, the organizer and guider of the club was Mike Dornbrook, a recent MIT biology graduate who had come to Zork only in 1980, as the first and most important playtester of the PC version.

More than anyone else around Infocom, Dornbrook was a believer in Zork, convinced it was far more than an interesting hacking exercise, a way to get some money coming in en route to more serious products, or even “just” a really fun game. He saw Zork as something new under the sun, something that could in some small way change the world. He strongly encouraged Infocom to build a community around this nascent new art form. At his behest, the earliest version of Zork included the following message on a note in the artist’s studio:

Congratulations!
You are the privileged owner of a genuine ZORK Great Underground Empire (Part I), a self contained and self maintaining universe. As a legitimate owner, you have available to you both the Movement Assistance Planner (MAP) and Hierarchical Information for Novice Treasure Seekers (HINTS). For information about these and other services, send a stamped, self-addressed, business-size envelope to:

Infocom, Inc.
GUE I Maintenance Division
PO Box 120, Kendall Station
Cambridge, Mass. 02142

Joining the smart-persons club was at this stage still quite a complicated process. The aforementioned self-addressed envelope would be retrieved by Stu Galley, who dutifully visited the post office each day. He then sent back a sheet offering a map for purchase, as well as the ultimate personalized hint service; for a couple of dollars a pop, Infocom would personally answer queries.

The map was adapted from Lebling’s original by Dave Ardito, an artist friend of Galley’s who embellished the lines and boxes with some appropriately adventurous visual flourishes. Dornbrook, who had some experience with printing, used his MIT alumni status to print the maps in the middle of the night on a big printing press that normally produced posters and flyers for upcoming campus events. He enlisted his roommate, Steve Meretzky, to help him.

Meretzky was also an MIT alum, having graduated in 1979 with a degree in construction management. He may have gone to the most important computer-science university in the world, but Meretzky wanted no part of that world. He “despised” computers and hackers. In Get Lamp‘s Infocom feature, Dornbrook described Meretzky’s introduction to Zork. Dornbrook was testing the game, and had borrowed a TRS-80 and brought it home to their apartment, where he set it up on the kitchen table.

He [Meretzky] came in the back door and saw the computer and said, “Away!” as only Steve could. I started telling him, “Steve, you’re going to love this!” I was trying to explain to him how to start the game up, and he puts his hands over his ears and starts screaming so he can’t hear me.

But apparently he heard enough. Over the course of the next several weeks, I started noticing when I’d come home and was about to start testing again that the keyboard might have moved half an inch or my notes had moved slightly. I realized Steve was playing the game but wasn’t willing to admit it. One night he finally broke down and said, “Alright! Alright! I need a hint!” And that was the beginning of the end for Steve.

Meretzky soon signed up as a tester, and also joined Dornbrook in his other Infocom-related projects.

There’s a great interview amongst the Get Lamp extras with David Shaw, an MIT student who wrote for the campus newspaper, whose offices were just above the press Dornbrook and Meretzky were surreptitiously borrowing. Shaw was confused by the fact that the press “always seemed to be running,” even when there were no new campus events to promote: “There were always the same two or three guys down there. They were printing something out that clearly wasn’t a movie poster, but they were also being very cagey about what it was they were printing.” One day Shaw found Dornbrook and Meretzky’s apparent “discard pile” of Zork maps and realized at last what was going on.

While the maps were a team effort, hints fell entirely to Dornbrook. He hand-wrote replies on ordinary paper. After a time he found it to be quite a profitable, if occasionally tedious, endeavor. Because most of the queries were variations on the same handful of questions, crafting personal answers didn’t take as much time as one might expect. (See the Infocom section of the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities for scans of the original maps and, even better, a couple of Dornbrook’s handwritten replies to hint requests.)

Then Dornbrook was accepted into an MBA program at the University of Chicago, scheduled to begin in the fall, meaning of course that he would have to leave Boston and give up day-to-day contact with the Infocom folks. No one else felt equipped to replace Dornbrook, who had by this point become in reality if not title Infocom’s head of public relations. Dornbrook, concerned about what would happen to “his” loyal customers, tried to convince President Joel Berez to hire a replacement. Impossible, Berez replied; the company just didn’t yet have the resources to devote someone to nothing but customer relations. So Dornbrook pitched another idea. He would form a new company, the Zork Users Group, to sell hints, maps, memorabilia, and even Infocom games themselves at a slight discount to eager players who joined his new club, which he would run out of Chicago between classes. Infocom in turn would be relieved of this burden. They could simply refer hint requests to Dornbrook, and worry only about making more and better games. Berez agreed, and ZUG was officially born in October of 1981. It would peak at over 20,000 members — but more about that in future posts.

Through much of 1981, Infocom assumed that Personal Software, publisher of the first Zork, would also publish Zork II. After all, Zork was a substantial hit. And indeed, PS responded positively when Infocom first talked with them about Zork II in April. The two companies went so far as to sign a contract that June. But just a few months later PS suddenly pulled the deal. Further, they also announced that they would be dropping the first Zork as well. What happened? wondered Infocom.

What had happened, of course, was VisiCalc. Dan Fylstra, founder of PS, had nurtured Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s creation from its very early days, donating an Apple II to the pair to help them develop their idea. Once released in October of 1979, VisiCalc transformed the microcomputer industry — and transformed its publisher. PS, formerly a publisher of games and hobbyist programs, was suddenly “the VisiCalc publisher,” one of the hottest up-and-coming companies in the country. As big as Zork was, it didn’t amount to much in comparison to VisiCalc. By 1981 games and hobbyist software made up less than 10 percent of PS’s revenue. Small wonder that Infocom often felt like their game was something of an afterthought for PS. Now the IBM PC was on the horizon, and PS found itself being courted even by the likes of Big Blue themselves, who needed for VisiCalc to be available on their new computer. Just as Microsoft was also doing at this time, PS began to reshape themselves, leaving behind their hacker and hobbyist roots to focus on the exploding market for VisiCalc and other business software. They began doing in-house development for the first time, rolling out a whole line of programs to capitalize on the VisiCalc name: VisiDex, VisiPlot, VisiTrend, VisiTerm, VisiFile. The following year PS would complete their Visification by renaming themselves VisiCorp, en route to disappearing up their own VisiBum in one of the more spectacular flameouts in software history.

In this new paradigm Zork was not just unnecessary but potentially dangerous. Games were anathema to the new army of pinstriped business customers suddenly buying PCs. Companies like PS, who wished to serve them and be taken seriously despite their own questionable hacker origins, thus began to give anything potentially entertaining a wide berth. The games line would have to go, victim of the same paranoia that kept Infocom’s own Al Vezza up at night.

This rejection left Infocom at a crossroads. It wasn’t, mind you, a disaster; there would doubtlessly be plenty of other publishers eager to sign them now that they had a hit game under their belt. Yet they weren’t sure that was the direction they wanted to go. While there was a certain prestige in being published by the biggest software publisher in the world, they had never really been satisfied with PS. They had always felt like a low priority. The awful Zork “barbarian” packaging PS had come up with made one wonder if anyone at PS had actually bothered to play the game, and promotion efforts had felt cursory and disinterested. Certainly PS had never shown the slightest interest in helping Infocom and Dornbrook to build a loyal customer base. If they wanted to build Infocom as a brand, as the best text adventures in the business, why should they have another company’s logo on their boxes?

But of course becoming a publisher would require Infocom to become a “real” company rather than one that did business from a P.O. Box, with more people involved and real money invested. In a choice between keeping Infocom a profitable little sideline or, well, going for it, the Infocom founders chose the latter.

Several of them secured a substantial loan to bankroll the transition. They also secured a fellow named Mort Rosenthal as marketing manager. He lasted less than a year with Infocom, getting himself fired when he overstepped his authority to offer Infocom’s games to Radio Shack at a steep discount that would get them into every single store. Before that, however, he worked wonders, and not just in marketing. A natural wheeler and dealer, he in Stu Galley’s words secured “a time-shared production plant in Randolph, an ad agency in Watertown, an order-taking service in New Jersey, a supplier of disks in California, and so on,” all in a matter of weeks. He also found them their first tiny office above Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The first two salaried employees to come to work there became Berez, the company’s most prominent business mind, and Marc Blank, the architect of the Z-Machine who had already more than a year before set aside his medical internship and moved back to Boston to take a flyer on the venture.

Showing an instinct for public perception that’s surprising to find in a bunch of hackers, Infocom made one last deal with PS — to buy back PS’s remaining copies of Zork and prevent them from dumping the games onto the market at a discount, thus devaluing the Zork brand. They needed to have Zork II out in time for Christmas, and so worked frantically with the advertising agency Rosenthal had found to craft a whole new look for the series. The motif they came up with was much more appropriate and classy than the old PS barbarian. In fact, it remains the established “look” of Zork to this day.

Ironically for a company whose games were all text, Infocom’s level of visual refinement set them apart, not least in the classic logo that debuted at this time and would remain a fixture for the rest of the company’s life. But speaking of text: in Zork II‘s advertising and packaging we can already see the rhetorical voice that Infocom fans would come to know, a seemingly casual, humorous vibe that nevertheless reflected an immense amount of care — this at a time when most game publishers still seemed to consider even basic grammar of little concern. In comparison to everybody else, Infocom just seemed a little bit classier, a little bit smarter, a little bit more adult. It’s an image that would serve them well.

Next time we’ll accept the invitation above and dive into Zork II itself, which did indeed make it out just in time for Christmas.

As the Dynamic Modeling Group put the final touches on Zork and put it to bed at last, it was beginning to feel like the end of an era at MIT. Marc Blank was about to graduate medical school and begin his residency in Pittsburgh, which would make extensive MIT hacking impossible even given his seemingly superhuman capacities. Others were finishing their own degree programs at MIT, or just running out of justifications for forestalling “real” careers with real salaries by hanging around their alma mater. In fact, a generational exodus was beginning, not just from the DMG but from MIT’s Laboratory for Computer and AI Lab in general as well. Pressures from the outside world were intruding on the hacker utopia inside MIT at last, pressures which in the next few years would change it forever. Much of the change stemmed from the invention of the microcomputer.

Most in established institutional hacking environments like MIT were initially nonplussed by what’s come to be called the PC revolution. That’s not so surprising, really. Those early microcomputers were absurdly limited machines. The homebrew hackers who bought (and often built) them were just excited to have unfettered access to something that, however minimally, met the definition of “computer.” Those privileged to find a place at an institution like MIT, however, not only had unfettered or nearly unfettered access to the systems there, but said systems were powerful enough to really do something. What charms did an Altair or even TRS-80 have to compare with sophisticated operating systems like TOPS-10 or TOPS-20 or ITS, with well-structured programming languages like LISP and MDL, with research into AI and natural-language processing, even with networked games like Maze and Trivia and, yes, Zork? The microcomputer world looked like a hopelessly uncultured and untutored one, bereft of a whole hacking tradition stretching back two decades or more. How could anyone try to build complex software using BASIC? When many institutional hackers deigned to notice the new machines at all, it was with withering contempt; Stu Galley called “We hate micros!” the unofficial motto of the DMG. They regarded the micros as little more than toys — the very same reaction as most of the general population.

By the spring of 1979, though, it was becoming increasingly clear to anyone willing to look that the little machines had their uses. WordStar, the first really usable microcomputer word processor, had been out for a year, and was moving more and more CP/M-based machines into offices and even writer’s studies. At the West Coast Computer Faire that May, Dan Bricklin demonstrated for the first time VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet program, which would revolutionize accounting and business-planning practice. “How did you ever do without it?” asked the first pre-release advertisement, hyperbolically but, as it turned out, presciently; a few years later millions would be asking themselves just that question. Unlike WordStar and even Scott Adams’s Adventureland, VisiCalc was not a more limited version of an institutional computing concept implemented on microcomputer hardware. It had been conceived, designed, and implemented entirely on the Apple II, the first genuinely new idea in software to be born on the microcomputer — and a sign of a burgeoning changing of the guard.

The microcomputer brought many, many more users to computers than had ever existed before. That in turn brought more private-industry investment into the field, driven by a new reality: that you could make real money at this stuff. And that knowledge brought big changes to MIT and other institutions of “pure” hacking. Most (in)famously, the AI Lab was riven that winter and spring of 1979 by a dispute between Richard Greenblatt, pretty much the dean of the traditional hacker ethic at MIT, and a more pragmatic administrator named Russell Noftsker. Along with a small team of other hackers and hardware engineers, Greenblatt had developed a small single-user computer — a sort of boutique micro, the first of what would come to be called “workstations” — optimized for running LISP. Believing the design to have real commercial potential, Noftsker approached Greenblatt with a proposal to form a company and manufacture it. Greenblatt initially agreed, but soon proved (at least in Noftsker’s view) unwilling to sacrifice even the most minute hacker principle in the face of business realities. The two split in an ugly way, with Noftsker taking much of the AI Lab with him to implement Greenblatt’s original concept as Symbolics, Inc. Feeling disillusioned and betrayed, Greenblatt eventually left as well to form his own, less successful company, Lisp Machines.

It’s not as if no one had ever founded a company out of MIT before, nor that commerce had never mixed with the idealism of the hackers there. The founders of DEC itself, Ken Olson and Harlan Anderson, were MIT alumni who had done the basic design for what became DEC’s first machine, the PDP-1, as students there in the mid-1950s. Thereafter, MIT maintained always a cozy relationship with DEC, testing hardware and, most significantly, developing much essential software for the company’s machines — a relationship that was either, depending on how you look at it, a goldmine for the hackers in giving them perpetual access to the latest technology or a brilliant scheme by DEC for utilizing some of the best computing minds of their generation without paying them a dime. Still, what was happening at MIT in 1979 felt qualitatively different. These hackers were almost all software programmers, after all, and the microcomputer market was demonstrating that it was now possible to sell software on its own as prepackaged works, the way you might a record or a book. As a wise man once said, “Money changes everything.” Many MIT hackers were excited by the potential lucre, as evidenced by the fact that many more chose to follow Noftsker than the idealistic Greenblatt out of the university. Only a handful, such as Marvin Minsky and the ever-stubborn Richard Stallman, remained behind and continued to hew relentlessly to the old hacker ethic.

Infocom’s founders were not among the diehards. As shown by their willingness to add (gasp!) security to ITS to protect their Zork source, something that would have drawn howls of protest from Stallman on at least two different levels, their devotion to the hacker ethic of total sharing and transparency was negotiable at best. In fact, Al Vezza and the DMG had been mulling over commercial applications for the group’s creations as far back as 1976. As the 1979 spring semester wrapped up, however, it seemed clear that if this version of the DMG, about to be scattered to the proverbial winds as it was, wanted to do something commercially, the time to get started was now. And quite a lot of others at MIT were doing the same thing, weren’t they? It wouldn’t do to be left behind in an empty lab, as quite literally happened to poor old Richard Stallman. That’s how Al Vezza saw the situation, anyway, and his charges, eager to remain connected and not averse to increasing their modest university salaries, quickly agreed.

And so Infocom was officially founded on June 22, 1979, with ten stockholders. Included were three of the four hackers who had worked on Zork: Tim Anderson, Dave Lebling, and the newly minted Dr. Marc Blank (commuting from his new medical residency in Pittsburgh). There were also five other current or former DMG hackers: Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, Joel Berez, Chris Reeve. And then there was Vezza himself and even Licklider, who agreed to join in the same sort of advisory role he had filled for the DMG back at MIT. Each person kicked in whatever funding he could afford, ranging from $400 to $2000, and received an appropriate percentage of the new company’s stock in return. Total startup funds amounted to $11,500. The name was necessarily nondescript, considering that no one knew quite what (if anything) the company would eventually do. The fractured, futuristic compound was much in vogue amongst technology companies of the time — Microsoft, CompuWare, EduWare — and Infocom just followed the trend in choosing the name “least objectionable to everyone.”

As should be clear from the above, Infocom did not exactly begin under auspicious circumstances. I’d call them a garage startup, except that they didn’t even have a garage. Infocom would exist for some months as more of a theoretical company in limbo than an actual business entity. It didn’t even get its first proper mailing address — a P.O. Box — until March of 1980. Needless to say, no one was quitting their day jobs as they met from time to time over the following months to talk about what ought to come next. In August, Mike Broos had already gotten bored with the endeavor and quit, leaving just nine partners. Everyone agreed that they needed something they could put together relatively quickly to sell and really get the company off the ground. More ambitious projects could then follow. But what could they do for that first project?

The hackers trolled through their old projects from MIT, looking for ideas. They kept coming back to the games. There was that Trivia game, but it wouldn’t be practical to store enough questions on a floppy disk to make it worthwhile. More intriguing was the Maze game. Stand-up arcades were booming at the time. If Infocom could build a version of Maze for arcades, they would have something unprecedented. Unfortunately, getting there would require a huge, expensive hardware- as well as software-engineering project. The Infocom partners were clever enough, but they were all software rather than hardware hackers, and money was in short supply. And then of course there was Zork… but there was no way to squeeze a 1 MB adventure game into a 32 K or 48 K microcomputer. Anyway, Vezza wasn’t really comfortable with getting into the games business on any terms, fearing it could tarnish the company’s brand even if only used to raise some early funds and bootstrap the startup. So there was also plenty of discussion of other, more business-like ideas also drawn from the DMG’s project history: a document-tracking system, an email system, a text-processing system.

Meanwhile, Blank was living in Pittsburgh and feeling rather unhappy at being cut off from his old hacking days at MIT. Luckily, he did have at least one old MIT connection there. Joel Berez had worked with the DMG before graduating in 1977. He had spent the last two years living in Pittsburgh and working for his family’s business (which experience perhaps influenced the others to elect him as Infocom’s President in November of 1979). Blank and Berez made a habit of getting together for Chinese food (always the hacker’s staple) and talking about the old times. These conversations kept coming back to Zork. Was it really impossible to even imagine getting the game onto a microcomputer? Soon the conversations turned from nostalgic to technical. As they began to discuss technical realities, other challenges beyond even that of sheer computing capacity presented themselves.

Even if they could somehow get Zork onto a microcomputer, which microcomputer should they choose? The TRS-80 was by far the best early seller, but the Apple II, the Cadillac of the trinity of 1977, was beginning to come on strong now, aided by the new II Plus model and VisiCalc. Next year, and the year after that… who knew? And all of these machines were hopelessly incompatible with one another, meaning that reaching multiple platforms must seemingly entail re-implementing Zork — and any future adventure games they might decide to create — from scratch on each. Blank and Berez cast about for some high-level language that might be relatively portable and acceptable for implementing a new Zork, but they didn’t find much. BASIC was, well, BASIC, and not even all that consistent from microcomputer to microcomputer. There was a promising new implementation of the more palatable Pascal for the Apple II on the horizon, but no word of a similar system on other platforms.

So, if they wanted to be able to sell their game to the whole microcomputer market rather than just a slice of it, they would need to come up with some sort of portable data design that could be made to work on many different microcomputers via an interpreter custom-coded for each model. Creating each interpreters would be a task in itself, of course, but at least a more modest one, and if Infocom should decide to do more games after Zork the labor savings would begin to become very significant indeed. In reaching this conclusion, they followed a line of reasoning already well-trod by Scott Adams and Automated Simulations.

But then there was still another problem: Zork currently existed only as MDL source, a language which of course had no implementation on any microcomputer. If they didn’t want to rewrite the entire game from scratch — and wasn’t the point of this whole exercise to come up with a product relatively quickly and easily? — they would have to find a way to make that code run on microcomputers.

They had, then, quite a collection of problems. We’ll talk about how they solved every one of them — and pretty brilliantly at that — next time.

In November of 1980 Personal Software began running the advertisement above in computer magazines, plugging a new game available then on the TRS-80 and a few months later on the Apple II. It’s not exactly a masterpiece of marketing; its garish, amateurish artwork is defensible only in being pretty typical of the era, and the text is remarkably adept at elucidating absolutely nothing that might make Zork stand out from its text-adventure peers. A jaded adventurer might be excused for turning the page on Zork‘s “mazes [that] confound your quest” and “20 treasures” needing to be returned to the “Trophy Case.” Even Scott Adams, not exactly a champion of formal experimentation, had after all seen fit to move on at least from time to time from simplistic fantasy treasure hunts, and Zork didn’t even offer the pretty pictures of On-Line Systems’s otherwise punishing-almost-to-the-point-of-unplayability early games.

In fact, though, Zork represented a major breakthrough in the text-adventure genre — or maybe I should say a whole collection of breakthroughs, from its parser that actually displayed some inkling of English usage in lieu of simplistic pattern matching to the in-game text that for the first time felt crafted by authors who actually cared about the quality of their prose and didn’t find proper grammar and spelling a needless distraction. In one of my favorite parts of Jason Scott’s Get Lamp documentary, several interviewees muse about just how truly remarkable Zork was in the computing world of 1980-81. The consensus is that it was, for a brief window of time, the most impressive single disk you could pull out to demonstrate what your new TRS-80 or Apple II was capable of.

Zork was playing in a whole different league from any other adventure game, a fact that’s not entirely surprising given its pedigree. You’d never guess it from the advertisement above, but Zork grew out of the most storied area of the most important university in computer-science history: MIT. In fact, Zork‘s pedigree is so impressive that it’s hard to know where to begin and harder to know where to end in describing it, hard to avoid getting sucked into an unending computer-science version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” To keep things manageable I’ll try as much as I can to restrict myself to people directly involved with Zork or Infocom, the company that developed it. So, let’s begin with Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, a fellow who admittedly had more of a tangential than direct role in Infocom’s history but who does serve as an illustration of the kind of rarified computer-science air Infocom was breathing.

Born in 1915 in St. Louis, Licklider was a psychologist by trade, but had just the sort of restless intellect that Joseph Weizenbaum would lament the (perceived) loss of in a later generation of scholars at MIT. He received a triple BA degree in physics, mathematics, and psychology from St. Louis’s Washington University at age 22, having also flirted with chemistry and fine arts along the way. He settled down a bit to concentrate on psychology for his MA and PhD, but remained consistently interested in connecting the “soft” science of psychology with the “hard” sciences and with technology. And so, when researching the psychological component of hearing, he learned more about the physical design of the human and animal auditory nervous systems than do many medical specialists. (He once described it as “the product of a superb architect and a sloppy workman.”) During World War II, research into the effects of high-altitude on bomber crews led him to get equally involved with the radio technology they used to communicate with one another and with other airplanes.

After stints at various universities, Licklider came to MIT in 1950, initially to continue his researches into acoustics and hearing. The following year, however, the military-industrial complex came calling on MIT to help create an early-warning network for the Soviet bombers they envisioned dropping down on America from over the Arctic Circle. Licklider joined the resulting affiliated institution, Lincoln Laboratory, as head of its human-engineering group, and played a role in the creation of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), by far the most ambitious application of computer technology conceived up to that point and, for that matter, for many years afterward. Created by MIT’s Lincoln Lab with IBM and other partners, the heart of SAGE was a collection of IBM AN/FSQ-7 mainframes, physically the largest computers ever built (a record that they look likely to hold forever). The system compiled data from many radar stations to allow operators to track a theoretical incoming strike in real time. They could scramble and guide American aircraft to intercept the bombers, enjoying a bird’s eye view of the resulting battle. Later versions of SAGE even allowed them to temporarily take over control of friendly aircraft, guiding them to the interception point via a link to their autopilot systems. SAGE remained in operation from 1959 until 1983, cost more than the Manhattan Project that had opened this whole can of nuclear worms in the first place, and was responsible for huge advances in computer science, particularly in the areas of networking and interactive time-sharing. (On the other hand, considering that the nuclear-bomber threat SAGE had been designed to counter had been largely superseded by the ICBM threat by the time it went operational, its military usefulness is debatable at best.)

During the 1950s most people, including even many of the engineers and early programmers who worked on them, saw computers as essentially huge calculators. You fed in some numbers at one end and got some others out at the other, whether they be the correct trajectory settings for a piece of artillery to hit some target or other or the current balances of a million bank customers. As he watched early SAGE testers track simulated threats in real time, however, Licklider was inspired to a radical new vision of computing, in which human and computer would actively work together, interactively, to solve problems, generate ideas, perhaps just have fun. He took these ideas with him when he left the nascent SAGE project in 1953 to float around MIT in various roles, all the while drifting slowly away from traditional psychology and toward computer science. In 1957 he became a full-time computer scientist when he (temporarily, as it turned out) left MIT for the consulting firm Bolt Beranek and Newman, a company that would play a huge role in the development of computer networking and what we’ve come to know as the Internet. (Loyal readers of this blog may recall that BBN is also where Will Crowther was employed when he created the original version of Adventure as a footnote to writing the code run by the world’s first computerized network routers.)

Licklider, who insisted that everyone, even his undergraduate students, just call him “Lick,” was as smart as he was unpretentious. Speaking in a soft Missouri drawl that could obscure the genius of some of his ideas, he never seemed to think about personal credit or careerism, and possessed not an ounce of guile. When a more personally ambitious colleague stole one of his ideas, Lick would just shrug it off, saying, “It doesn’t matter who gets the credit; it matters that it gets done.” Everyone loved the guy. Much of his work may have been funded by the realpolitik of the military-industrial complex, but Lick was by temperament an idealist. He became convinced that computers could mold a better, more just society. In it, humans would be free to create and to explore their own potential in partnership with the computer, which would take on all the drudgery and rote work. In a surprising prefiguring of the World Wide Web, he imagined a world of “home computer consoles” connected to a larger network that would bring the world into the home — interactively, unlike the passive, corporate-controlled medium of television. He spelled out all of these ideas carefully in a 1960 paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” staking his claim as one of a long line of computing utopianists that would play a big role in the development of more common-man friendly technologies like the BASIC programming language and eventually of the microcomputer itself.

In 1958, the U.S. government formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency in response to alleged Soviet scientific and technological superiority in the wake of their launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, the previous year. ARPA was intended as something of a “blue-sky” endeavor, pulling together scientists and engineers to research ideas and technology that might not be immediately applicable to ongoing military programs, but that might just prove to be in the future. It became Lick’s next stop after BBN: in 1962 he took over as head of their “Information Processing Techniques Office.” He remained at ARPA for just two years, but is credited by many with shifting the agency’s thinking dramatically. Previously ARPA had focused on monolithic mainframes operating as giant batch-processing “answer machines.” From Where Wizards Stay Up Late:

The computer would be fed intelligence information from a variety of human sources, such as hearsay from cocktail parties or observations of a May Day parade, and try to develop a best-guess scenario on what the Soviets might be up to. “The idea was that you take this powerful computer and feed it all this qualitative information, such as ‘The air force chief drank two martinis,’ or ‘Khrushchev isn’t reading Pravda on Mondays,” recalled Ruina. “And the computer would play Sherlock Holmes and conclude that the Russians must be building an MX-72 missile or something like that.”

“Asinine kinds of things” like this were the thrust of much thinking about computers in those days, including plenty in prestigious universities such as MIT. Lick, however, shifted ARPANET in a more manageable and achievable direction, toward networks of computers running interactive applications in partnership with humans — leave the facts and figures to the computer, and leave the conclusions and the decision-making to the humans. This shift led to the creation of the ARPANET later in the decade. And the ARPANET, as everyone knows by now, eventually turned into the Internet. (Whatever else you can say about the Cold War, it brought about some huge advances in computing.) The humanistic vision of computing that Lick championed, meanwhile, remains viable and compelling today as we continue to wait for the strong AI proponents to produce a HAL.

Lick returned to MIT in 1968, this time as the director of the legendary Project MAC. Formed in 1963 to conduct research for ARPA, MAC stood for either (depending on whom you talked to) Multiple Access Computing or Machine Aided Cognition. Those two names also define the focus of its early research: into time-shared systems that let multiple users share resources and use interactive programs on a single machine; and into artificial intelligence, under the guidance of the two most famous AI proponents of all, John McCarthy (inventor of the term itself) and Marvin Minsky. I could write a few (dozen?) more posts on the careers and ideas of these men, fascinating, problematic, and sometimes disturbing as they are. I could say the same about many other early computing luminaries at MIT with whom Lick came into close contact, such Ivan Sutherland, inventor of the first paint program and, well, pretty much the whole field of computer-graphics research as well as the successor to his position at ARPA. Instead, I’ll just point you (yet again) to Steven Levy’s Hackers for an accessible if necessarily incomplete description of the intellectual ferment at 1960s MIT, and to Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner for more on Lick’s early career as well as BBN, MIT, and our old friend Will Crowther.

Project MAC split into two in 1970, becoming the MIT AI Laboratory and the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). Lick stayed with the latter as a sort of grandfather figure to a new generation of young hackers that gradually replaced the old guard described in Levy’s book as the 1970s wore on. His was a shrewd mind always ready to take up their ideas, and one who, thanks to his network of connections in the government and industry, could always get funding for said ideas.

LCS consisted of a number of smaller working groups, one of which was known as the Dynamic Modeling Group. It’s oddly difficult to pin any of these groups down to a single purpose. Indeed, it’s not really possible to do so even for the AI Lab and LCS themselves; plenty of research that could be considered AI work happened at LCS, and plenty that did not comfortably fit under that umbrella took place at the AI Lab. (For instance, Richard Stallman developed the ultimate hacker text editor, EMACS, at the AI Lab — a worthy project certainly but hardly one that had much to with artificial intelligence.) Groups and the individuals within them were given tremendous freedom to hack on any justifiable projects that interested them (with the un-justifiable of course being left for after hours), a big factor in LCS and the AI Lab’s becoming such beloved homes for hackers. Indeed, many put off graduating or ultimately didn’t bother at all, so intellectually fertile was the atmosphere inside MIT in contrast to what they might find in any “proper” career track in private industry.

The director of the Dynamic Modeling Group was a fellow named Albert (Al) Vezza; he also served as an assistant director of LCS as a whole. And here we have to be a little bit careful. If you know something about Infocom’s history already, you probably recognize Vezza as the uptight corporate heavy of the story, the guy who couldn’t see the magic in the new medium of interactive fiction that the company was pursuing, who insisted on trivializing the game’s division work as a mere source of funding for a “serious” business application, and who eventually drove the company to ruin with his misplaced priorities. Certainly there’s no apparent love lost between the other Infocom alumni and Vezza. An interview with Mike Dornbrook for an MIT student project researching Infocom’s history revealed the following picture of Vezza at MIT:

Where Licklider was charismatic and affectionately called “Lick” by his students, Vezza rarely spoke to LCS members and often made a beeline from the elevator to his office in the morning, shut the door, and never saw anyone. Some people at LCS were unhappy with his managerial style, saying that he was unfriendly and “never talked to people unless he had to, even people who worked in the Lab.”

On the other hand, Lyon and Hafner have this to say:

Vezza always made a good impression. He was sociable and impeccably articulate; he had a keen scientific mind and first-rate administrative instincts.

Whatever his failings, Vezza was much more than an unimaginative empty suit. He in fact had a long and distinguished career which he largely spent furthering some of the ideas first proposed by Lick himself; he appears in Lyon and Hafner’s book, for instance, because he was instrumental in organizing the first public demonstration of the nascent ARPANET’s capabilities. Even after the Infocom years, his was an important voice on the World Wide Web Consortium that defined many of the standards that still guide the Internet today. Certainly it’s a disservice to Vezza that his Wikipedia page consists entirely of his rather inglorious tenure at Infocom, a time he probably considers little more than a disagreeable career footnote. That footnote is of course the main thing we’re interested in, but perhaps we can settle for now on a picture of a man with more of the administrator or bureaucrat than the hacker in him and who was more of a pragmatist than an idealist — and one who had some trouble relating to his charges as a consequence.

Many of those charges had names that Infocom fans would come to know well: Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Stu Galley, Joel Berez, Tim Anderson, etc., etc. Like Lick, many of these folks came to hacking from unexpected places. Lebling, for instance, obtained a degree in political science before getting sucked into LCS, while Blank commuted back and forth between Boston and New York, where he somehow managed to complete medical school even as he hacked like mad at MIT. One thing, however, most certainly held true of everyone: they were good. LCS didn’t suffer fools gladly — or at all.

One of the first projects of the DMG was to create a new programming language for their own projects, which they named with typical hacker cheekiness “Muddle.” Muddle soon became MDL (MIT Design Language) in response to someone (Vezza?) not so enamoured with the DMG’s humor. It was essentially an improved version of an older programming language developed at MIT by John McCarthy, one which was (and remains to this day) the favorite of AI researchers: LISP.

With MDL on hand, the DMG took on a variety of projects, individually or cooperatively. Some of these had real military applications to satisfy the folks who were ultimately funding all of these shenanigans; Lebling, for instance, spent quite some time on computerized Morse-Code recognition systems. But there were plenty of games, too, in some of which Lebling was also a participant, including the best remembered of them all, Maze. Maze ran over a network, with up to 8 Imlac PDS-1s, very simple minicomputers with primitive graphical capabilities, serving as “clients” connected to a single DEC PDP-10 “server.” Players on the PDS-1s could navigate around a shared environment and shoot at each other — the ancestor of modern games like Counterstrike. Maze became a huge hit, and a real problem for administrative types like Vezza; not only did a full 8-player game stretch the PDP-10 server to the limit, but it had a tendency to eventually crash entirely this machine that others needed for “real” work. Vezza demanded again and again that it be removed from the systems, but trying to herd the cats at DMG was pretty much a lost cause. Amongst other “fun” projects, Lebling also created a trivia game which allowed users on the ARPANET to submit new questions, leading to an eventual database of thousands.

And then, in the spring of 1977, Adventure arrived at MIT. Like computer-science departments all over the country, work there essentially came to a standstill while everyone tried to solve it; the folks at DMG finally got the “last lousy point” with the aid of a debugging tool. And with that accomplished, they began, like many other hackers in many other places, to think about how they could make a better Adventure. DMG, however, had some tools to hand that would make them almost uniquely suited to the task.