Even though Dave Hughes and research scientist George L. Johnston had conversed innumerable times by phone and computer network, Johnston still wasn't entirely prepared for his first face-to-face encounter with the self-proclaimed "cursor cowboy." It was the night before the two men were to speak at a Washington D.C. computer technology workshop, and they were registered in the same hotel.
"I knocked on Dave's door," Johnston said, "and here's this big
guy with a cowboy hat sitting on the side of his bed disassembling
his telephone and hooking his computer to it with gold-plated alligator clips."
At first Hughes's behavior struck Johnston as extreme; appropriate, perhaps, for a teenage hacker, but unseemly for a 64-year-old highly decorated retired Army colonel. But Johnston eventually came around. "Now it makes completely good sense to me," he said. After all, "if the hotel doesn't have jacks, how are you going to connect without taking the phone apart?"
And connecting - using his computer and modem to exchange ideas with some of the millions of people who subscribe to computer networks throughout the world - is precisely what Dave Hughes has been doing for the past 14 years, with a passion that some might label obsession. Hughes estimates that during that time he has been linked to a computer network or bulletin board an average of four or five hours a day, has read 30 or 40 million electronic words, and has posted at least a million of his own.
Thanks to his loquaciousness, Hughes is unquestionably the best-known online personality in the country. His postings are staples of computer conferencing systems as far-flung as the WELL in Sausalito, California, and Metanet in Washington, D.C. To his admirers, he's "the prairie populist," "the cowboy poet laureate online," even "the Ben Franklin of the Information Age." Playing upon the cowboy persona that he has cultivated in his postings, Hughes
himself says his "great equalizer" is not a six-shooter, but his laptop computer.
Jack Rickard, who as editor of Boardwatch Magazine has monitored the proliferation of computer bulletin boards to their current level of more than 60,000 US systems, calls Hughes "the online bumblebee - he cross-pollinates a lot of things. He gets the Unix people involved with bulletin boards and the bulletin board hobbyists involved with Unix, and then he gets both of those involved with the Internet and ties in the educators to all of them."
Sometimes the online controversies Hughes inspires evoke a hornet more than a bumblebee, as when he unapologetically violated WELL guidelines a year ago by distributing pro-Ross Perot postings without permission, or, more recently, when he became the only WELL user to express ardent support for the military's ban of homosexuals.
Eat!
Considering Hughes's down-home comportment, it's tempting not to take him seriously. He customarily packs his snowman's girth into attire that includes a Stetson hat, string tie, and cowboy boots, and his online writing style is heavy on "ain'ts" and casual with spelling. He is, moreover, just as garrulous in person as he is behind a keyboard. Ask him a question, particularly about telecommunications, and be prepared for an hour-long response whose riverine course can be diverted by interruption but not halted.
On a recent Saturday morning, for example, Hughes greeted me at his home in Colorado Springs with a monologue about the utility of packet radios in linking laptop computers around the world. We then sat down to breakfast, and although Hughes's wife Patsy placed scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast on the table, he declined to take a bite, for fear of slowing down his narrative. Ten minutes later, Patsy silently emerged from the kitchen displaying a paper on which she'd written one word: "Eat." Hughes laughed and kept right on talking.
If Hughes's discourses are meandering, however, they usually have a point - often one that has escaped telecommunications entrepreneurs and policy makers. He has earned his volubility, in a sense, by focusing extraordinary energy and inquisitiveness on telecommunications issues and compiling a significant record of achievement, usually without the support of any major institution, by dint solely of the clarity of his perceptions. He's both a gadfly and a visionary, whose cowboy trappings disguise the singularity of his purpose. Louis Jaffe, Hughes's former business partner, was not indulging in overstatement when he said, "Dave has been one of the key figures worldwide in legitimizing computer communication for the average person and for illustrating its potential." Hughes, for once, is more succinct: "My life's mission is to hook up the 5.5 billion brains on this planet."
Although that objective is surely beyond even Hughes's expansive reach, his accomplishments point tantalizingly in that dir-ection. More than a decade ago he taught the first college course (on the nature of electronic discourse) for credit using asynchronous computer conferencing, thus pioneering a pedagogic method that has since become widespread. After starting his own computer bulletin board system in Colorado Springs in 1981, he used it to marshal support for local political campaigns, and enjoyed enough success to demonstrate the usefulness of bulletin boards in politics.
In 1987 he branched out, providing the inspiration and technical knowledge necessary to establish the Big Sky Telegraph regional conferencing system in Montana, which links isolated rural communities and schools by computer. In 1991, after an eight-year campaign to popularize a potentially low-cost telecommunications graphics standard, the North Atlantic Presentation Level Protocol Syntax (NAPLPS, pronounced NAP-lips), he persuaded Microstar Software, a Canadian company that developed two key NAPLPS programs, to release its software as inexpensive shareware, dramatically enhancing NAPLPS's prospects. After being rebuffed in efforts to develop his own integrated NAPLPS software in this country, Hughes hired two Russian programmers to do the work for one tenth of what the effort would have cost in the United States (he plans to market the product this year).
As if to confirm his expertise in building inexpensive telecommunications networks, Hughes was one of three people asked in December by a member of President Clinton's transition team to estimate the cost of establishing a computer network for the nation's public schools. With NAPLPS conceivably poised for public acceptance and an Administration newly ensconced in the White House that appears to grasp the importance of telecommunications, Hughes believes the culmination of a decade and a half of work may be at hand.
If that happens, Hughes may at last be in position to reap substantial financial benefit from his labors. In addition to his military pension, he says he only earns between $20,000 to $35,000 a year from consulting, giving speeches, and operating his bulletin board systems. Income, however, is clearly a secondary concern: Hughes is a preacher whose keyboard is his pulpit, and whose satisfaction is proportional to souls converted to the gospel of computer telecommunications.
Networking for the Middle Class
Part of Hughes's underlying motivation seems to stem from class consciousness. It's possible that he first felt the sting of class distinctions just after his father, a wholesale food salesman, died of a ruptured appendix when Hughes was six years old. His mother moved to Denver with his three sisters and left him with a wealthy aunt in Colorado Springs; even now, Hughes speaks of his aunt with an edge, as if her upper-class world were not entirely congenial to him. "I'm not concerned about the elites - they'll take care of themselves," he said. "I'm not concerned about the disadvantaged - we have central systems coming out the ears for them, working pretty well. I am very much concerned with the middle class, particularly the lower-middle class. What the hell does the Information Age mean to them? We haven't answered that question." Unless we do, Hughes asserts, we're headed for a division between the information-rich and information-poor.
Hughes's empathy for the common man was apparent by the end of his military career. A West Point graduate, he emerged from the Korean War as the most highly-decorated member of his class; later he fought in Vietnam and worked as a Pentagon counterinsurgency expert. His ideas formed the basis of a seminal 1966 speech by then-Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, which argued that economic, social, and political developments were as important as military considerations in determining national security.
But it wasn't until Hughes retired from the Army in 1973 that the full extent of his class concern surfaced. Living once more in Colorado Springs, he volunteered to head a local centennial celebration, and then transformed the affair into an effort to revitalize an historically significant but economically depressed seven-block working-class neighborhood he dubbed Old Colorado City. When Hughes discovered that landlords were reluctant to rehabilitate their ramshackle properties because the improvements might lead to increased taxes, he invited state legislators to march in the centennial parade and participate in a five-day reenactment of the town's glory days. He then used the opportunity to persuade the lawmakers to enact legislation declaring a five-year moratorium on tax increases for commercial buildings more than 30 years old. Hughes eventually presided over a rejuvenation so successful that even now, not one vacancy sign appears in the windows of Old Colorado City's commercial buildings.
When Hughes joined the online world in 1979, he demonstrated the same qualities of vision, persistence, and political acumen to attain his aims. Hughes's first computer conferencing experience was on a McLean, Virginia-based system called The Source. He quickly realized that the value of this new medium lay in its users's abilities to converse and provide information to one another, and he tapped into The Source to consult experts in urban redevelopment for the Old Colorado City project.
It's likely, in fact, that Hughes understood The Source's business better than its own managers did, for they believed the system should focus on providing information services from institutions like the Associated Press. Hughes suggested various stratagems to enhance user-to-user communications, and when they went unheeded, he closed his account and started his own bulletin board system in Colorado Springs. The Source was eventually sold.
Colorado Springs was fertile ground for computer bulletin boards: Because the town was surrounded by military installations and high-tech companies, many residents were already comfortable with digital technology. Now Hughes showed them the political potential of computer networks. His first notable foray into electronic politics occurred when he discovered that the city planning commission was promulgating a zoning ordinance that would place stringent restrictions on home businesses. Hughes believed the proposed ordinance was based on the out-of-date Industrial Age notion that businesses such as backyard auto body shops were likely to disrupt neighborhoods, when in fact the people who worked at home were more likely to be harbingers of the information age.
He attended the commission's next meeting, persuaded the officials to table the ordinance for 30 days, then wrote a letter to the city newspaper inviting citizens to discuss the proposal on his bulletin board. The result was that when the commission held its next meeting, 175 people attended. "When I walked into the meeting," Hughes said, "I knew I'd done something, but I hadn't organized anything. All I did was run a goddamned bulletin board. " Responding to the public pressure, the planners twice rewrote the ordinance, which was eventually passed by the city council.
From then on, Hughes says, residents began expressing their political views on the bulletin board, and city and county officials began reading it to stay politically attuned. Hughes tried to insure that the board reflected popular sentiment by naming its political discussion area after a working class tavern in Old Colorado City called "Roger's Bar." Although Hughes drinks sparingly, he made it a point to visit the bar at least once a week, and persuaded its owners to install a phone jack at one of the booths so that he could connect his laptop to his bulletin board. Hughes then invited patrons to use his laptop to log on from the bar. And when Hughes logged on to other conferencing systems, he did his best to make the bar famous, extolling it as "the neighborhood bar in the Global Village."
Hughes's interest in telecommunications was not limited to the political realm. After Frank Odasz, a self-described "retread carpenter" with an interest in networks, contacted Hughes in 1984, Hughes became Odasz's mentor, and the two men developed the idea for a low-cost regional network based in Odasz' home town of Dillon, Montana.
Called Big Sky Telegraph, the network was designed to counter the isolation that is a fact of Montana life by providing a cheap, multipurpose alternative to the long-distance phone calls that are Montanans's principal means of communication. Funded by various foundation grants, the system went up in January, 1988, and soon linked more than 100 one-room schools, as well as bigger schools, women's centers, organizations for disabled people, and many other groups.
Eventually the system grew to include six "Tiny Sky" networks dispersed around Montana and Wyoming. Since most people consider teleconferencing forbiddingly complicated, Big Sky offered free online lessons and sent "circuit riders" with computers and overhead projection systems around the state to give demonstrations.
The system proved so useful that the state government decided to emulate it, establishing 17 more local computer networks under the aegis of the Montana Educational Telecommunications Network (METNET). With so many local networks, users could connect while paying lower long-distance or even local phone rates, and their postings could be distributed to all networks on the system overnight.
Using similarly ingenious low-cost techniques, METNET enabled students in tiny rural schools to communicate with students of the same age around the world. Cynthia Denton, until last year a teacher at the only public school in Hobson, Montana (population 200), describes the benefit of such links. "When we got our first messages from Japan, a wonderful little fifth-grade girl named Michelle was asked if she was a boy or girl. She was extraordinarily indignant at that, and said, 'I'm Michelle - I'm a girl, of course.' Then I pointed out the name of the person who had asked the question and said, 'Do you know if this is a boy or a girl?' She said, 'No, how am I supposed to know that?' I said, 'Oh, the rest of the world is supposed to know that Michelle is a girl, but you have no social responsibility to know if this is a boy or a girl?' She stopped and said 'Oh.' And then she rephrased her reply considerably."
Hughes promoted computer networks as teaching tools again when George Johnston, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's plasma fusion center, offered to teach an online course in chaos mathematics. Within two weeks of their conversation, in the late summer of 1990, Hughes had assembled a class of 20 high school students in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, and Johnston began teaching the semester-long course. Johnston ended up teaching the course three times, and considers it a qualified success. One junior high school teacher reported to Johnston that it led the students to "taste the excitement of research that I did not have until my senior year" in college. Another student's success in the course emboldened her to apply for admission to MIT, where she was accepted and began her freshman year last fall.
Yet Johnston believes that the biggest lesson he learned in teaching the course was about the limitations of online instruction -- something Hughes had grasped a decade earlier: "In order to teach science and mathematics, you need symbolic and graphic capabilities," Johnston said. But standards now in use on computer networks enable low-cost transmission of text only. Johnston tried to make up for the absence of the online equivalent of a blackboard by using words to portray graphs and mathematical equations, but found the alternative inadequate. Johnston now understood why Hughes had been an ardent supporter of NAPLPS since learning of its existence in 1983, and became Hughes's vocal ally in gaining acceptance for the standard.
Unlike ASCII, currently the dominant telecommunications standard, NAPLPS facilitates the transmission of foreign language text, mathematical equations and scientific graphs, images, and even crude animation. Furthermore, it has the potential to transmit simple imagery far more economically than methods now in use, because it uses text-like symbols rather than data-intensive bit maps. Nevertheless, until now it has failed to catch on, among other reasons because its advantage of economy decreases in the case of complex, high-definition images that many high-end telecommunications users require. To Hughes, however, this was no major drawback, since the uses of telecommunications he found most compelling did not demand such sophisticated imagery.
Hughes became NAPLPS's most prominent and outspoken advocate. Using the software, he conducted a two-day workshop for impoverished Native American artists from five northwestern reservations, showing them how to create simple images that could be transmitted electronically. Some of the results can now be downloaded for a minimal charge from Denton's Russell Country bulletin board system in Hobson; 85 percent of the proceeds are passed back to the artists. Hughes also has been working to create a word-processing program that uses NAPLPS to enable deaf people to communicate in written sign language.
Based partially on the enthusiasm that some bulletin board operators are at last showing for NAPLPS, Hughes is confident that the standard will gain widespread acceptance in 1993. But that development will not be universally cheered. Mike Liebhold, a senior scientist in media architecture research at Apple Computer, endorses Hughes's notion that low-cost software is essential to provide schools, libraries, and communities with access to telecommunications services, but he considers NAPLPS too dated to accommodate the video and sound uses of telecommunications that he believes are coming soon. "Five years ago I would have had no reason to object to a NAPLPS strategy, but now I think we've crossed the threshold," he said. "It seems foolish at this point to work with such a retrograde software architecture."
Liebhold's criticism infuriates Hughes, among other reasons because Hughes believes that Apple has a vested interest in NAPLPS's failure. Hughes argues that the "improved communications environments" Liebhold envisions are too complex to function within the vast majority of computers now owned by schools and other low-end users. They therefore would be forced to buy expensive computers, such as Apple's Macintosh line. NAPLPS, on the other hand, works on virtually all computers in use today.
Hughes@grave.com
Hughes is clearly irrepressible, even more so than his response to Liebhold's criticism suggests. Indeed, if he has his way, nothing - not even his death - will deter him from promoting his vision of a connected world. His list of projects includes software that would facilitate transmission of his ideas from his gravesite. His plan is to encode his thought processes within a heuristic program that, after his death, would digest new information and offer Hughesian responses. He has gone so far as to draw up a codicil to his will calling for installation of a solar-powered, radio-linked computer above his crypt that would begin transmissions precisely six months after his death. Hughes says, "It will come alive on bulletin boards and say, 'This is Dave Hughes - wanna chat?'" With a laugh, he adds, "Nobody will know the difference!"
Sidebar -
Postings from a Net Cowboy
Excited by Ross Perot's enthusiasm for "electronic democracy," Hughes became an ardent Perot supporter during last year's Presidential campaign, and used one of his bulletin board systems to promote Perot's candidacy. When Perot dropped out of the race in July, Hughes posted this message on the WELL.
I hope all *you* cynics - who bitched about Perot running, and are now bitching about his not running - are happy he is out of it. But let me give it to you loud and clear. I *refuse* to vote in this election and take the *slightest* responsibility for the next bullshit 4 years which promises to be absolutely mnore of the same avoiding of the hard questions, promises none of them can keep, and whch will lead - if there is no collapse of the national goverments ability to pay (as has occurred in California) there will be vastley more cynicism than you have ever seen. So don't you *dare* lecture me as if there is something wrong with *me* because i refuse to support either of the two party choices - or their parties. It is you who will be the ones contributing directly to 'no change' when change is desperately needed. There will be NONE now. And I'll be back here in June of next year to tell you - I told you so.
In November, 1992, Hughes visited Moscow to meet the Russian computer scientists he had hired to develop his NAPLPS program, and posted a serialized account of his trip on the WELL. In this excerpt he visits a McDonald's Restaurant in Moscow, accompanied by his Russian acquaintance Tania and her daughter Zhenia.
When I had wondered aloud about the Moscow McDonald's earlier, there was lots of revelations about how Zhenia had been there many times - paid for by foreign boyfriends - while Tania had been there only twice. Knowing how poor restaurants were in the city, and the limited diet they were on at their flat, I suggested I would treat them to dinner there. Tania wanted to know whether I was 'homesick' for McDonald's. No, I said. I really just wanted to see how it operated and whether I could detect any difference in flavor between a Big Mac in Moscow - with beef from Russia - and ones back home.
So we grabbed a bus and arrived to see over 700 people in line waiting to get in, as darkness fell. Tania was ready to abandon the wait, Zhenia really wanted to go. "Only 25 minutes" she said, and I noticed the line moving briskly. So I said lets wait and we did.
It took almost 40 minutes, and I got irritated enough to block one of a score of people who just muscled their way to the front past the line, but all in all it was a time for study of faces outside in the grey night, the bright-lighted activity inside, and the proof of something the whole thing respresented. For in spite of the fact that things were desperate economically, and prices in rubles for its offering were considered high, McDonald's was obviously prospering. And the people in line did not look particularly different from those on the street in general.
The whole operation, given the great crush of people, looked efficiently run. When we got inside it only took about 2 minutes to order and get served. I ordered a Big Mac and a Strawberry shake, while Tania and Zhenia ordered ordinary hamburgers, shake, Sprite, and french fries. It came to 800 rubles, which, as Tania pointed out, was one-tenth the monthly salary of a scientist in Moscow. 800 rubles was slightly over $2 US. I calculated that the same order would have cost at least $6 dollars in Colorado Springs.
Of course they will only take rubles there, so I had $5.00 changed on the street, at the rate of 370 to one.
We even got a place to sit in the brightly lighted interior, with scores of counter attendents, clean up crews, and managers about, and counter attendents 3 deep. About 3 times the intensity of operation in every square meter of floor space of any McDonald's I have ever been in. It was very clean and continuously kept that way. Most people carried their own trays to the trash receptacles when finished.
I could detect absolutely no difference in the taste of the Big Mac, the ice cream shake, or the french fries from any McDonald's fare I have eaten anywhere else. Which, given the Russian source of the beef, somewhat suprised me in a country where I noticed that all fruit, tomatoes, meats privately prepared, all tasted a little different from their US counterparts.
I laughed when I saw the Cyrillic spelling of Big Mac on the hamburger wrapper. So I carefully folded it up and took it with me as a really notable souvineer.
It was a pleasant outing, all in all.
On the way out in the busy dark, we happened across the spot where that lifesize cut-out of Gorbachev stands for tourists to have their humerous picture taken. I put my Stetson on Gorbachev, a fur hat on myself, and had Tania snap the flash picture. Everyone standing around was laughing loudly, as the hat 'did' something for Gorby.
But Moscow had its revenge, after all. A gust of wind knocked my $200 Stetson into the wet street where it smudged quite a bit. And in walking further on Gorky Street I stepped where I thought solid ground was in the center of a huge man-hole cover and sank up to my booted ankle in dirty black Russian muck, leaving a scum on my $165 Justin boots for the rest of the stay.
As Tania noted, "The dirt in Moscow is very dirty." But I had a taste of what swallowed up Hitler and Napoleon's armies in the Russian winter.
