Cynbe ru Taren
Encyclopedia
Cynbe ru Taren is an American computer programmer. He is the author of Citadel
, arguably the first virtual world
system and one of the longest-running open source
projects; the Digital Anatomist software, better known as the Visible Human Project; the original Pascal strek.pas Star Trek game program; the first Loglan
parsers; and Mythryl, a production-grade port of SML/NJ
.
on December 24. The first release used a phone number that connected to the hardware in ru Taren's study. At first he did not call the program Citadel: instead he named it Ode, after its phone number, the acronym of which was ODE-DATA, later changed to ODD-DATA at the suggestion of friends.
The version of Citadel released December 24, 1980 was written in C and was fast, responsive, self-maintaining, and ran on a 90KB floppy disc. The world consisted of a collection of rooms connected by “clues”. Since some of the rooms were invisible, each clue included the name of the clued room as part of the clue. (For details of the Citadel room architecture see the Citadel software
page; for details of the Citadel program architecture see below.)
Even at its most early stage, the new social forms enabled by the Citadel system allowed users to display aberrant and antisocial behavior which is now well-known among virtual world researchers, including griefing, unresolvable arguments, and misreadings of innocuous remarks resulting in flame wars. When hardware problems finally brought the system down, ru Taren felt that he had had enough of peacekeeping and wanted to concentrate on programming. Consequently he passed the software system on to David Mitchell, a friend who lived on Bainbridge Island, not far from ru Taren’s home. The system Mitchell acquired went on to become the canonical Citadel.
In April 1982 ru Taren released Citadel V.2.11 to the C Users Group mailing list. As a social experiment and to distribute power more broadly, V.2.1.1 provided for a class of people who were neither sysadmins nor users, but who had partial sysadmin powers. To afford a measure of accountability, their actions produced an unerasable paper trail. V.2.11 also implemented a secure database by encrypting it on disc using a simple XOR hash. Ru Taren continued to make further innovations in the Citadel software before moving on to other projects.
Ru Taren posted the Citadel source code to the RCP/M archive network in 1990. The code is cited as one of the longest running open source projects.
Citadel (software)
Citadel is the name of a bulletin board system software program, and of the genre of programs it inspired. Citadels were notable for their room-based structure and relatively heavy emphasis on messages and conversation as opposed to gaming and files...
, arguably the first virtual world
Virtual world
A virtual world is an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. The term has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of...
system and one of the longest-running open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
projects; the Digital Anatomist software, better known as the Visible Human Project; the original Pascal strek.pas Star Trek game program; the first Loglan
Loglan
Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a language so different from natural languages that people learning...
parsers; and Mythryl, a production-grade port of SML/NJ
Standard ML of New Jersey
Standard ML of New Jersey is a compiler and programming environment for Standard ML. Aside from its runtime system, which is written in C, SML/NJ is written in Standard ML...
.
Personal history
Cynbe ru Taren was born March 15, 1956 in London, Ontario to academic parents. He attended kindergarten in Ontario; first form in London, England; second form in Cambridge, England; third grade in Boston, Massachusetts; and fourth through twelfth in Seattle, Washington. He lived in Seattle, programming and designing virtual worlds, until 1997, when he moved to Austin, Texas to live with his wife Allucquere Rosanne Stone, who is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Beginning in 1998, Prothero and Stone divided their time between Santa Cruz and Tahoe City, California while maintaining a residence in Austin during school sessions.The Digital Anatomist/Visible Human
Ru Taren enrolled at the University of Washington in 1974, spending most of his time at the Campus Computer Center. He learned his craft at the Visual Techniques Laboratory, using a PDP10 and a Mohawk Data 600LPM printer. Before long he was working as a full-time programmer for the department of Biological Structure, headed by John W. Sundsten and John Prothero. He wrote the Skandha visualization system, which assembled microscopic sections of biological material into three-dimensional images which could be manipulated minutely to reveal details of the interior of such objects as the human body. The Biological Structure department named this effort the Digital Anatomist project. Its image database was supplied with raw digital material by Wolfgang Rauschning, a Swedish researcher in microtomy and microscopy who specialized in producing ultrathin tissue cross-sections. Rauschning's method was subtractive, ablating a layer of carefully frozen tissue only a few thousand molecules thick, coating the exposed surface with a glycerol mixture which Rauschning adapted to the specific tissue, photographing the surface at high resolution, and repeating until the tissue was completely sectioned. Rauschning sent each image via Internet to the Digital Anatomist database at the University of Washington in Seattle. His method produced extremely high resolution digital images in vivid color with almost none of the distortion which would normally be caused by the displacement forces generated by the action of a conventional microtome at extreme thinness settings. Ru Taren, Sundsten and Prothero asked Rauschning to include fiduciaries in his sections, which enabled ru Taren's Skandha 3D visualization software to assemble the huge digital database into three-dimensional flythrough-capable anatomical images with extremely fine grain. The group made ru Taren's tapes of the 3D reconstructions freely available on their website. Hearing of this work, the National Library of Medicine issued a Call for Proposals for a national 3D anatomical reconstruction database which would later become the Visible Human project. To the astonishment of the Digital Anatomist group, they found that the University of Colorado had made a strong bid for the contract using ru Taren’s data tapes as examples of its own work. Technically there was nothing illegal about doing so, since the tapes were freely available, but Colorado's bid did not mention their provenance. Colorado won the contract, and continued to display ru Taren’s work without attribution for the first three years of the contract, although its later work was not based on the methodology developed by the Digital Anatomist project (Colorado's specimen sectioning system involved something rather like a bandsaw), and produced considerably coarser-grained reconstructions. Shortly afterward, the chief scientists of the UW Digital Anatomist project resigned in frustration.Citadel BBS
In 1980 ru Taren completed building his second computer, a Heath H89. Using a Silent 700 acoustic coupler with a homebrew power supply, he began writing code on December 14 and released the first version of CitadelCitadel (software)
Citadel is the name of a bulletin board system software program, and of the genre of programs it inspired. Citadels were notable for their room-based structure and relatively heavy emphasis on messages and conversation as opposed to gaming and files...
on December 24. The first release used a phone number that connected to the hardware in ru Taren's study. At first he did not call the program Citadel: instead he named it Ode, after its phone number, the acronym of which was ODE-DATA, later changed to ODD-DATA at the suggestion of friends.
The version of Citadel released December 24, 1980 was written in C and was fast, responsive, self-maintaining, and ran on a 90KB floppy disc. The world consisted of a collection of rooms connected by “clues”. Since some of the rooms were invisible, each clue included the name of the clued room as part of the clue. (For details of the Citadel room architecture see the Citadel software
Citadel (software)
Citadel is the name of a bulletin board system software program, and of the genre of programs it inspired. Citadels were notable for their room-based structure and relatively heavy emphasis on messages and conversation as opposed to gaming and files...
page; for details of the Citadel program architecture see below.)
Even at its most early stage, the new social forms enabled by the Citadel system allowed users to display aberrant and antisocial behavior which is now well-known among virtual world researchers, including griefing, unresolvable arguments, and misreadings of innocuous remarks resulting in flame wars. When hardware problems finally brought the system down, ru Taren felt that he had had enough of peacekeeping and wanted to concentrate on programming. Consequently he passed the software system on to David Mitchell, a friend who lived on Bainbridge Island, not far from ru Taren’s home. The system Mitchell acquired went on to become the canonical Citadel.
Citadel (software)
Citadel is the name of a bulletin board system software program, and of the genre of programs it inspired. Citadels were notable for their room-based structure and relatively heavy emphasis on messages and conversation as opposed to gaming and files...
In April 1982 ru Taren released Citadel V.2.11 to the C Users Group mailing list. As a social experiment and to distribute power more broadly, V.2.1.1 provided for a class of people who were neither sysadmins nor users, but who had partial sysadmin powers. To afford a measure of accountability, their actions produced an unerasable paper trail. V.2.11 also implemented a secure database by encrypting it on disc using a simple XOR hash. Ru Taren continued to make further innovations in the Citadel software before moving on to other projects.
Ru Taren posted the Citadel source code to the RCP/M archive network in 1990. The code is cited as one of the longest running open source projects.