The Many Faces of Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger

Because the focus of Pathfinders was to document and provide commentary about the works rather than to offer in-depth criticism, we did not give a detailed rationale for our strategy while the project was underway. With so many variants of Malloy’s work produced, it is important to know the differences between them because insights gained from this knowledge not only shed light on her artistic practice but also reflect cultural changes that affected her literary expression. Herein lies the focus of this essay.

As a work of experimental digital literature, Uncle Roger has always been articulated in code, and it was always intended to be experienced on computers. An accomplished programmer, Malloy did all of her own coding for Uncle Roger. Having studied systems analysis at the University of Denver, she learned FORTRAN during her years with Ball Brothers Research Corporation in Boulder, Colorado (Malloy, email to Grigar, July 3, 2015). Later she taught herself to write UNIX Shell Scripts, program in Applesoft BASIC and GW-BASIC, and code in HTML. She realized her interests in software development by producing “an artist’s personal authoring system” for Uncle Roger—Narrabase, built in UNIX and BASIC (Malloy, email to Grigar, May 24, 2015). Because of Uncle Roger’s born-digital status and Malloy’s emphasis on it as software for authoring digital literature, variants of Uncle Roger can indeed be seen as versions, where unique names pertain to unique states of the work. In Ex-Foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path, Terry Harpold talks about the importance of “register[ing] … differences where that can be done, and [attending] to what they might reveal of the historical arc of our reading” (2009, 3). This is the strategy we take in versioning Malloy’s Uncle Roger, and we do so by attending to changes to its form (e.g., serial novel to database narrative); platform (e.g., Applesoft Basic to GW-BASIC); and content (e.g., toning down sexual references for public access on the Web).

Gaining access to works created for computers and computer systems now obsolete poses challenges for scholars. The serial novel, for example, was conceptualized as an online performance not meant to be printed on paper and read (Malloy, email to Grigar, June 20, 2015). Only two copies exist, one held by Malloy and the other by the Judy Malloy Papers at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.² Likewise Version 2, the interactive narrative of Uncle Roger, was not preserved. Only recently has Malloy discovered in her own archives the necessary software to recreate it. Also complicating scholarship of Malloy’s work is the fact that her standalone artists’ software is stored on floppy disks unreadable on contemporary computers. But a handful of copies of Uncle Roger’s floppy disks remain, anyway, and the few held in the Judy Malloy Papers are restricted for digital preservation and cannot be read.³ For our own research we were able to borrow Malloy’s personal copy of Uncle Roger on floppy disk and read it using a vintage computer in this author’s lab.⁴ Comparing this copy with the Web and emulated versions, as well as examining Malloy’s comments about earlier work made in essays, interviews, and email exchanges, has helped to identify the six variants of Uncle Roger. In consultation, Malloy verified her agreement with this schema.

Our work demonstrates that Malloy approached each recreation of Uncle Roger as a unique work of art, conceptualizing it to take advantage of the affordances of the platform or medium on which it would reside and by which the audience would reach it. For close to thirty years, Malloy has kept Uncle Roger alive and accessible to her reading audience. At a time when Flash-based poetry and fiction created less than a decade ago are becoming unreadable on computing devices, this is no small feat.

Version 1: Serial Novel for the Net

As Malloy reports, the first version of Uncle Roger stemmed from an invitation she received in 1986 from her friend Carl Loeffler, founder of the La Mamelle Art Center and gallery. In operation from 1975 until 1995, the gallery specialized in avant-garde art arising out of the San Francisco scene and beyond and later evolved to include a cable TV series. Projects such as the 1976 Xerox art exhibit and 1977’s Send/Receive, a performance simultaneously broadcast in New York and San Francisco, established the gallery as cutting edge and Loeffler as visionary (“Elsewhere on the Net,” 2001).⁵ When Loeffler was introduced to the online community of The WELL upon its 1985 launch, he was inspired to expand his ideas about art and technology to the new virtual space. With performance artist Fred Truck serving as programmer, Loeffler launched ACEN in September 1986 (Malloy 2013, “Memories of Art Com and La Mamelle”). ACEN offered a host of resources, including an online exhibition space, art publications, retail store, and a conferencing system (referred to as a Bulletin Board System or BBS) that allowed for online interaction among the community members.⁶

The BBS was especially useful for sustaining online conversations about art. For this purpose, The WELL used PicoSpan, created by Marcus Watts in 1983 for the Unix operating system. As Malloy writes:

Initially, The WELL’s server was a VAX, located beside Sausalito harbor, at the foot of a dock, where colorful houseboats were inhabited by artists and poets. The conference software—the Unix-based PicoSpan computer conferencing system, written by Marcus D. Watts in 1983 and provided by Brilliant’s conferencing software company, Network Technologies International (NETI)—both enabled and organized virtual conversation. Although some users found PicoSpan’s learning curve difficult, once mastered, its flexibility and clarity fostered an environment of online community. (Malloy 2016, 27)

The BBS was structured so that participants stayed focused on a single thread. It also made comments impossible to censor. This last feature encouraged frank discussions about and approaches to art and resulted in open and lively conversations. In a 1997 Wired article, “The Epic Saga of the Well,” Katie Hafner reports:

PicoSpan didn’t simply foster openness but forced it on users. The program was designed so that everyone who signed up would be invited to write a personal bio of any length to reside permanently on the system. Another feature, known—somewhat illogically—as “scribbling,” allowed participants to delete their words after the fact. But the scribbled posting would appear as a new blank posting to everyone else in the conference. In other words, you couldn’t erase your words without others knowing about it. … Also, postings didn’t expire—that is, they didn’t self-destruct automatically after a certain amount of time.

Though slow by today’s standards, discussions did take place in hours rather than days, as they might via the US Postal Service, for example. “Feedback,” Loeffler felt, was “instant.”⁷ He also learned that the “‘community’ in the online environment was actually diverse” in terms of the audience’s background and training, “a pleasant surprise for an art organization interested in expanding the audience for contemporary art” (“Elsewhere on the Net,” 2001).

Thus, when Loeffler asked Malloy to “go online and write” in a venue hosting discussions on topics such as “Software as Art,” publishing work, and featuring “actual works of art … by John Cage, Jim Rosenberg, and others,” she jumped at the chance. For the nine years leading up to Loeffler’s invitation, Malloy had already been experimenting with art as “molecular … units” (Malloy 1991, 200), a notion that also described her nondigital work, such as her “3 × 5 inch cards or file folders full of information” (Malloy 1988, 371). On December 1, 1986, Malloy presented the first lexia of the seventy-five she created for A Party in Woodside, the first of two files associated with the serial novel. Malloy also posted “links associated with” the lexias. As she recounts, “The idea was that readers could pull the text and keywords into their own database software.” Howard Rheingold lent a hand and created “a parallel topic to discuss Uncle Roger and how to implement it” on Topic 15 (Malloy 1991, 200). “Some actually did,” Malloy reports. Over the course of the next forty days, until January 29, 1987, she posted at least one lexia of the serialized novel daily, taking advantage of PicoSpan’s single thread feature—“co-opting (with permission),” she recalls. The Blue Notebook, “file 2,” followed seven months later in July 1987 (Malloy 2014).

To access the seventy-five lexias comprising Version 1 today is not easy. For most it means travel to Duke University’s library. However, Malloy recounts the story in various places, and we know from interviews with her⁸ that Uncle Roger involves numerous plots and subplots relayed through the perspective of Jenny, a twenty-one-year old who works in the Bay Area as the babysitter for the wealthy Broadthrow family and becomes entangled in the intrigue involving Tom Broadthrow and his company, BroadthrowMicro. Tom, we learn in A Party in Woodside, has stolen a custom chip from Jeff Gallagher, a young man in whom Jenny claims a romantic interest. This plot rises to a climax in The Blue Notebook. Jenny, we learn, is the niece of the titular Uncle Roger, who is heavily implicated in the shenanigans surrounding the stolen chip. Jenny’s other stories, both fanciful and real, focus on relationships with other characters and the tensions resulting from conflicts arising from her personal experiences: her former lover David; her family back on the East Coast; the growing romantic involvement with Jeff; extramarital affairs between people with whom she comes in contact or knows well; the imagined destruction of Somerville, Massachusetts, by bombs dropped from blimps; caring for the child she is hired to babysit; and many more. However, Jenny is not a completely reliable narrator. In A Party in Woodside, she reveals that she drank too much wine and slept “fitfully,” her thoughts “interspersed with dreams.” In The Blue Notebook, she admits that what she is writing down—and so telling us about the story—is not “exactly” how the events happened. Malloy purposely takes this strategy. In the first file, Jenny, she says, is

telling the story as experienced in a night after where dreams mingle with reality, and the difference is blurred—and, in the second file, deliberately introducing elements of magic realism. It would be expected that elements in the work of artists like Carolee Schneemann, Chris Burden, and Kathy Acker would seep into my work or were parallel with my work. For years, by the way, I had a copy of [Richard Brautigan’s] Trout Fishing in America (“The waterfall was just a flight of wooden stairs”) on a shelf in my work area. It never occurred to me that it was an influence, but it was in the environment of my writing. In my work of that era, … I generally used unexpected settings, a Silicon Valley bedroom community for instance, a Falstaffian Semiconductor Systems Analyst. We could go back to Plautus. … The magic realism and explicit, dream-laced lexias of Uncle Roger worked well in the environment of ACEN. The immersive party in Silicon Valley environment also worked well for the wider WELL audience … (at least those who followed ACEN). (Malloy, email to Grigar, July 4, 2015)

The main conflict underlying Uncle Roger involves Jenny’s struggle to gain footing in the world and agency as an adult in an atmosphere where theft of intellectual property and destruction of people’s livelihoods, and lives, are the norm.

The dominant action takes place over several months and includes a party held at the Broadthrow home in September (A Party in Woodside) and a birthday party in honor of Tom Broadthrow at a restaurant in South Bay two weeks later (The Blue Notebook). Indulgence in large quantities of food and drink makes for rowdy festivities, but in this story about the heady world of the chip industry, where so much money is at stake, parties are also prime locations for intrigue and conflict. That the Broadthrow home frames the story for A Party in Woodside (and, in later versions, Terminals) places the Broadthrow family front and center of the action. Common themes emerge: journey, struggle for agency and independence, promise and betrayal of the American Dream, love, lust, revenge, and loss. Along with recurring characters, the party settings, and themes, we find motifs and symbols—sailboats, dreams, chips (silicon and potato), bodies of water (lakes and ocean), food, and colors—that contribute to the cohesiveness of a story told in increments over a course of eight weeks and continued seven months later.

The story struck a chord with Malloy’s Bay Area audience on The WELL. Many of those reading Uncle Roger themselves worked in some aspect of computing—some even in the semiconductor industry—and so were aware of the piracy taking place in the cutthroat business. More than likely, they were also familiar with Malloy’s allusion to a green background on a computer monitor reflected in Jenny’s comment: “What I type on the keyboard appears in green on the screen which is called a monitor” (Malloy, Terminals, Record No. 107). As Rheingold recalls in The Virtual Community, a “few hundred people” were members of The WELL when it began in 1985 (1993, 2), but it grew to into the thousands by 1994.⁹ Malloy’s audience, though exceedingly small in comparison to the number of people online today, included a considerable number of highly digitally literate people—or “digerati,” they were called (Hafner 1997). In 1983, the first year that Americans were polled about computer usage, for example, only 10 percent of households reported owning a computer; 1.4 percent reported using the Internet. By 1990, 42 percent of the population used computers. Studies suggest that the cost of computers lay outside of the budget of most Americans at the time (Fox and Rainie 2014). A brand new Apple IIe that members of Malloy’s audience may have used to access The WELL and read Uncle Roger sold for $1,395 in 1983, equivalent to $3,400 today. Malloy had begun using a personal computer in 1985 (Malloy, 1991, 196), and her own Apple II was purchased used from “the legendary Used Computer Store in Berkeley” (Malloy, email to Grigar, July 3, 2015). Feedback to the story, therefore, was possible because the audience was digitally literate and affluent and so quite capable of accessing it.

While the audience could not intervene in the story directly, audience members were able to respond to the topics Malloy and Rheingold prepared for them. Rheingold’s “parallel topic” (Malloy 2014), entitled “Feedback re: Uncle Roger,” was available alongside Malloy’s lexias and provoked responses to which she reacted like “any oral storyteller or performer.” In fact, Malloy claims to have “played to” her audience (McKeever 2014a). Printouts of responses in her personal files show an engaged and playful audience, much like those of Twitter or Facebook today. And like tweets and Facebook posts, WELL users’ responses ranged from advice to praise to flirtation. One user suggested, “If you don’t want to bother with computer databases, the way to use the story would be to print it on 4″ × 6″ cards.” Another writing a little later that day said, “Whatever it is, it sure promises to be sexy, and I’m all for sexiness.” To the futurist and fellow WELL user Tom Mandel, Loeffler wrote:

Post 12 on Topic 15: Feedback re: Uncle Roger

12: Artcom (artcomtv)

OK … Tom

What (?) jacket are you wearing???????????¹⁰

In fact, scholars consider this version of Uncle Roger, delivered as a serial novel, one of the first examples of online participatory literature (Berens, 2014, 343; Grigar and Moulthrop 2015).

The comment about the work’s “sexiness” highlights the fact that Malloy leveraged the openness of the system’s technology and the community’s adventurous nature to tell a story that contained a frank depiction of sexuality. If the serial novel resembles the story relayed in Version 3, as Malloy suggests, then the first lexia of A Party in Woodside, for example, may have read:

I dreamed that Jeff and I were in bed.

He was running his hands up and down my

body.

He put his tongue in my mouth.

His hands were on my nipples.

He ran his fingers down the inside of my

thighs. (APIW, Record No. 1)

Another lexia describes Jenny “put[ting her] hand on [Jeff’s] cock” in response to him “biting [her] nipples.” Still another has Jeff rubbing suntan oil down Jenny’s “ass.” Such graphic depiction of sex is rare today on public sites such as Facebook and Twitter. As recently as March 2015, Facebook censored benign information on sexual health (“Take a Stand against Censorship,” 2015), and Twitter blocked searches of the word “porn” (O’Hara 2015). Many of the lexias hinting at unacceptable conduct would not pass the censorship of either social media site. Incest and pedophilia, especially, figure largely in early versions of the story. In A Party in Woodside, Jenny recounts a story her cousin Anne shared with her involving Uncle Roger, who tied her “to a bed. … It was one of those beds with pineapples on the bedknobs.” Jenny learns that Uncle Roger then told Anne to “take off all [her] clothes,” which seems to be impossible in light of Anne being tied up. In another lexia Jenny reports that when she was a child, Uncle Roger asked her questions such as, “Have you ever seen a grown man’s penis?” In The Blue Notebook, Jenny overhears him pointing out “cute boys” to BroadthrowMicro’s lawyer, Bob Draper. Later, when Uncle Roger was distributed on the Web for a wider audience, references to this kind of behavior were dropped, and Uncle Roger emerges, instead, as a Falstaffian character full of mischief and mildly ribald humor (Malloy, email to Grigar, July 4, 2015). Such a change in tone reinforces the differences among the versions and demonstrates one of the ways the work changed as it moved on to larger audiences.

It is also important to note that even as a serial novel performed for an audience, Uncle Roger was created so that Malloy’s audience members could use “their own database software” and the “keyword field” that she produced for each lexia to read the work. This effort resulted in a story told nonsequentially and with a measure of interactivity (McKeever 2014a). Though this feature of Uncle Roger was not as visually appealing as Malloy had wanted (McKeever 2014b), she realized it in a more satisfactory way in Version 2, when she was able to control the look and feel of the online database readers used to access the work.

Version 4: Standalone Artists’ Software for IBM Compatible Computers

In 1988 Malloy translated the code for Applesoft BASIC into GW-BASIC in order to make a version of the Uncle Roger boxed collection for IBM-compatible computers, which some gallery managers and festival curators were using. Malloy herself had made the leap to the IBM 286 (Malloy, email to Grigar, July 3, 2015).¹⁹ This version of Uncle Roger, 4.1, was not meant to be sold but rather given away (Malloy, email to Grigar, May 25, 2015). One copy is held at Duke; another, possibly originally belonging to Loeffler (Malloy, email to Grigar, May 27, 2015), resides at the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) at the University of Colorado Boulder. No other extant copy is on record, and Malloy has not discussed this work in the same detail as other versions.

Malloy remembers Version 4.1 having much the same content as Version 3.3, possibly with some small edits (McKeever 2014a). Unlike Version 3.3, where each file was saved on its own disk, this version featured all three files on the one floppy disk, sharing an “overarching menu” (Malloy, email to Grigar, May 25, 2015). Screenshots provided by Lori Emerson, director of MAL, only include records from A Party in Woodside and show the similarity in content between the two versions (figure 2.6). However, unlike Version 3 published as three files, Version 4 was structured like Versions 1 and 2 with all three files organized into one interface.

Figure 2.6 Introduction to Version 4.0 of *Uncle Roger.*

Malloy’s code for the directory clearly shows that all three files were programmed on the disk, located at lines 540, 550, and 560 of the code:

100 REM Uncle Roger PC Version
110 REM Copyright Judy Malloy 1988
350 FOR x = 1 to 10
400 SOUND 100, .01
410 SOUND 40, .01
415 SOUND 32767,1
420 NEXT x
500 FILE$ = “TITLE”
510 GOSUB 700
512 FOR x = 1 TO 10000: NEXT x
520 CLS: FILE$ = “MENU”
530 GOSUB 700
535 PRINT: INPUT ” ? “, C$
540 IF C$ = “1” THEN CHDIR “party”: CHAIN “PARTY.BAS”
550 IF C$ = “2” THEN CHDIR “blue”: CHAIN “BLUE.BAS”
560 IF C$ = “3” THEN CHDIR “terms”: CHAIN “FILE3.BAS”
565 IF C$ = “stop” THEN GOTO 900
570 IF C$ = “STOP” THEN GOTO 900
580 PRINT “You typed “; C$:PRINT “Please try again.”
585 FOR X=1 TO 10000: NEXT X: GOTO 520
690 END
700 REM FILE PRINTING SUB
710 OPEN FILE$ FOR INPUT AS #1
720 WHILE NOT EOF (1)
730 LINE INPUT #1, LINES$
740 PRINT LINES$
760 SOUND 100,.01
770 SOUND 40, .01
780 SOUND 32767,1
790 FOR A=1 to 500: NEXT A
800 WEND
810 CLOSE #1
820 PRINT
830 PRINT
840 RETURN
850 END
900 REM end
904 FOR x = 1 to 5
905 SOUND 100, .01
910 SOUND 40, .01
915 SOUND 32767,1
920 NEXT x
930 FILE$ = “title”
940 GOSUB 700
950 LOCATE 10,10: PRINT “THE END”
960 FOR x = 1 to 10000: NEXT x
970 CLS: PRINT: Locate 14,30: PRINT “c1986-1988 Judy Malloy”
975 PRINT:PRINT
980 PRINT TAB(10): PRINT “UNCLE ROGER first appeared on”
990 PRINT TAB(10): PRINT “Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on the WELL”
995 PRINT TAB(10): PRINT “The ACEN Datanet version of THE BLUE NOTEBOOK”
997 PRINT TAB(10): PRINT “was funded by The California Arts Council”
998 PRINT TAB(10): PRINT “and Art Matters”
1000 END

As mentioned, the structure of Version 4.1 recalls that of Versions 1 and 2, where multiple files shared a common menu (Malloy 2015d). We know that Malloy later used the programming from this version of Uncle Roger for Version 6, the DOSBox emulation, so we can ascertain that A Party in Woodside and The Blue Notebook functioned as databases involving two keywords, and Terminals remained a generative text with a fixed beginning and ending.

The introductory screen for A Party in Woodside 4.1 is identical to that of Version 3.3. In fact, the screenshots of the ten records provided us from Version 4.1 (Records No. 4–5, 12, 32–38) show a work exactly the same as Version 3.3, including the broken lines caused by the fifty-character restriction. If indeed Malloy made edits to this version, we cannot know exactly what they are without a copy of the floppy disk.

Version 5: Uncle Roger on the Web

In 1993 Apple discontinued production of the IIe, and by the mid-1990s 5.25-inch floppy disks disappeared altogether from the market. This period also saw the introduction of browser software, a technology that made it possible to “surf” the World Wide Web to sites displaying color images, static and animated. By 1995, 16 million users worldwide were going online (“Internet Growth Statistics”). In comparison, The WELL’s usership amounted to 5,000–16,000, according to various sources.²⁰ Recognizing what the Web had to offer to artists, Malloy created a fifth version of Uncle Roger in HTML and published it via The WELL in 1995, the first year the community opened its doors to websites (Pernick 1995). Updated in 2012 and again in 2015, this version is, according to Malloy, “the authorized text of the work” (Malloy, email to Grigar, June 25, 2015) and constitutes the version used by scholars for criticism and analysis of the work for the last twenty-two years.

The status conferred on this version, over the four previous, makes sense in light of the robustness of Web technology.²¹ Versions 3 and 4 were only accessible for about eight years. Approximately twenty copies of Version 3.3 were sold (Malloy, email to Grigar, June 13, 2015). We have no way of knowing how many copies of Version 4.1 Malloy produced, though we can estimate based on the number of exhibitions in which Uncle Roger was shown. Version 5, by comparison, has been readily available for over twenty years. With the exception of a new title page and introduction in 2012 (Version 5.2) and a revision to its metadata in 2015 (Version 5.3), the work remains as it was produced in 1995, unaffected by current browsers optimized for the fifth formal revision of Hypertext Markup Language, HTML5. The ubiquity and pervasiveness of the Web make Version 5 far easier to access than previous editions. Its potential audience is staggering: in 1995 less than 1 percent of the world’s population used the Internet daily; as of this writing, the number has risen to about 40 percent, or roughly 3.5 billion people (“Internet Live Stats”). There is no need to travel to Duke to read the print-out of the serial novel or to track down a vintage computer, much less find a copy of the database novel on floppy disks. Version 5 also took advantage color and images, made possible by the graphic user interface of the Web browser.²²

This version also has much more space for displaying text than did its predecessors. Obviously, book pages have a fixed physical boundary, but even digital technologies such as PicoSpan constrained Malloy to a fifty-character column length with between one and eighteen lines per screen. The Apple IIe forced text to break at forty or eighty characters, with a maximum of twenty-six lines per screen. The Web browser, however, is different. One can produce a webpage with words that go on and on, allowing readers to scroll seemingly forever. The only limitations center on design considerations, server capacity, and readers’ patience. The Web’s linking feature also condenses the actions required to access lexias into a simple click on a word in the navigational menu. Versions 3 and 4 of Uncle Roger required readers to query the system with a keyword, then wait for the next screen, possibly add a second keyword, then wait for the screen containing the first lexia associated with the relevant keywords. Cutting the number of steps between reader and text down to one click makes for a more immediate reading experience.

Version 5, like all versions besides 3.3, unites the three files into a single interface with a shared menu (figure 2.7). Different, however, from all other versions is the use of color and graphical elements for navigation. The layout, divided into two parts, offers a menu on the left of the screen containing an artist’s statement, background on the story, and access to a BASIC version created for the DOSBox emulator. Arranged vertically in the middle of the screen, in order from file 1 to file 3, we find A Party in Woodside, The Blue Notebook, and Terminals represented by both a graphic image and text. Visitors to the website simply click on one or the other to access the story.

Figure 2.7 Interface for *Uncle Roger*, Version 5.

Clicking on file 1 of A Party in Woodside takes readers to its opening page, where they encounter a list of fifteen hyperlinked words and an image of a wine glass filled with red wine. This image represents Jenny’s words, “I drank too much red wine,” encountered in the previous versions of the story. Each word in the list, if selected, takes readers to a screen that features a lexia with an accompanying image. Selecting “Louise” from the list of words on the opening page, for example, takes readers to this lexia:

When the party began, the plastic cover

was removed from the white couch.

Mrs Broadthrow was wearing a lime green silk suit

that I had just picked up for her at the cleaners.

Her blouse was white silk with a plunging neckline. Gold earrings

framed her finely chiseled face.

Her name is Louise.

To the left of the lexia is again the image of a wine glass. At the bottom of that lexia we find the navigational menu of twenty-one words, with four of these, including “Louise,” hyperlinked. Choosing “Louise” from that list or clicking on the image of the wineglass takes readers to a new lexia pertaining to Louise. The two choices for navigating through the story—the hyperlinked words at the bottom of the screen and the image—recall the two-keyword search combination of the database narrative that constitutes both Versions 3 and 4.

In Version 5 Malloy brings back all twenty-one keywords from Version 3.3 as well as one omitted—“family.” Five keywords listed in Version 3.3’s opening screen are excluded from Version 5’s—“Miss Gorgel,” “Mark,” “Caroline,” “David,” and “Rose”—but, thanks to the limitless space Malloy has to work with, are listed in the navigational menu at the bottom of the screen.

The structure of The Blue Notebook differs from that of A Party in Woodside. Malloy uses only images for navigation—gone are the textual links. Though Malloy had used graphic icons previously for The Woodpile, the artwork she produced as a card catalog in 1981 (McKeever 2014b), the addition of images to Uncle Roger in the Web version suggests a major change. Until this time the work had been expressed almost exclusively in words, with just one ASCII graphic found in its introductory screens. The inclusion of graphic images and use of graphical elements as hyperlinks were both innovative because early Web pages tended to comprise primarily text. The first Web pages, published in 1991, were “exclusively textual” because of speed constraints imposed by dial-up modems. By the mid-1990s, graphical elements had made their way into Web design (Kelly 2013), but Malloy’s application of them was unusual for 1995.

Another change in the Web version involves the way readers can search the work. Whereas before they could search one to two keywords for records, now readers had three graphical choices for navigating the story. As Malloy writes:

There is a difference between the Boolean searches allowed in the early versions of Uncle Roger and offering multiple link choices in the Web version. Boolean searches combine the links, for instance searching for Jenny and Chips produces only lexias in which both these words are applicable in each lexia; in contrast, hypertextual links generally only offer a choice of paths. You can’t search these paths simultaneously. (Malloy, email to Grigar, August 30, 2015)

Clicking on the image or words listed with The Blue Notebook, for example, takes readers to the first lexia:

I was down at the end of the last table.

There was no one to my right and no one

across from me.

It was Tom’s birthday. He was at the head of the

table. Louise was sitting at his right. We were

sitting at four tables pushed together in a

restaurant in a hotel just off the highway that

runs down the East side of the South Bay. (Record No. 1)

To continue the story, readers choose from images of the filled wine glass, a man’s white tie (with a pink and blue design), and waves of water against a blue background. Clicking on any of these images, which surround the text, takes readers to a new lexia with the same layout. Besides these, readers also encounter images of a coffee cup, a man’s pink tie (with a white and blue design), and waves of water against a black background. All six images function as navigational mechanisms.

To access Terminals, readers click on the image of a computer keyboard or the name of the story and are taken to a screen showing the image of the keyboard below the first lexia:

In the room where I work, there are

about twenty desks, called “stations”.

A computer takes up most of the space at

each station. Each computer has a

black screen which rests on a gray case,

and a keyboard which is attached to the

computer by a cord, like those cords which

hold the two pieces of telephones together.

They call the computers “terminals”.

It is interesting to note that Malloy retains the forty-character line length in this lexia. However, accessing the story differs widely from previous versions. To navigate the story in Version 5, readers click on the keys of the keyboard. Because the keys are not lettered or numbered, readers have no idea what lexias they will be evoking when clicking on the keys. This design is intended to simulate the way the random generator worked in previous versions of Terminals (McKeever 2014b). The layout of Terminals Version 5 also differs from that of the previous two files. Where A Party in Woodside and The Blue Notebook are centered, Terminals is left justified.

In terms of the story, an examination of Versions 3.3 and 5 provides insight into the way Malloy edited her work for the Web and leveraged it to create an enduring legacy for Uncle Roger. The main changes seem to focus on broadening the appeal of the story to the larger Web audience, one that differs from The WELL’s, who were, for the most part, “baby boomers in their late 30s and early 40s, smart and left-leaning without being self-consciously PC, mostly male, many with postgraduate degrees” (Hafner, 1997). Now Uncle Roger could be read by millions of people who might not be open to a story with graphic lovemaking and references to incest and pedophilia. Sexual content is toned down considerably in Version 5. Jenny also comes across as less insecure and tormented by nightmares, and Louise loses the pettiness and meanness she displayed toward Jenny in Version 3.3. In Version 5 Louise is simply cool and professional toward her.

In considering Malloy’s revisions to the story’s sexual content, it is important to note that she is a living writer, actively working to maintain her legacy. This much is clear in the way she has tended to the migration, emulation, and collection of her work, especially Uncle Roger. Her changes mark shifting societal views, but more importantly they represent changes authors can make anytime they wish. Such is the nature of creation. Because the Web provides a surface on which the things we write can always be in development, it encourages impermanence—what Landow described as lack of “fixity” (Landow 1992, 59). What is written one day can be overwritten the next. We may find that when this book is published, everything we have written about Malloy’s Version 5 could be woefully out of date because Malloy has changed the work.

Examples of the toned-down sexual content are seen in lexias 1, 17, and 70, when Jenny dreams about making love with Jeff:

Lexia 1

Version 3.3

Version 5.2

I drank too much red wine.
The Broadthrow’s party is looping in my
mind,
nested with brief dreams and nightmares.
I dreamed that Jeff and I were in bed.
He was running his hands up and down
my body.
He put his tongue in my mouth.
His hands were on my nipples.
He ran his fingers down the inside of my
thighs.
But in the morning, he wanted fruit for
breakfast.
I didn’t have any fruit.
There was some broccoli behind the
cookb ooks,
but when I pulled it out,
it was covered with cockroaches.

I drank too much red wine.
The Broadthrow’s party is looping
in my mind,
nested with brief dreams and
nightmares.
I dreamed that Jeff and I were in
bed.
He was running his hands up and
down my body.
He put his tongue in my mouth.
His hands were on my breasts.
He ran his fingers down the inside
of my thighs.
We made love.
In the morning, he wanted a cheese
omlette,
but there was no cheese in the
refrigerator.

Lexia 17

Version 3.3	Version 5.3
In this dream, I was on a Pullman train with Jeff. It was like the train I took to Washingt on, DC with my Mother and Aunt Sally when I was in Junior High. Jeff and I were in the top bunk which was very small. He was biting my nipples. I put my hand on his cock. It was dark, and the train rocked gently on the tracks as it moved swiftly along toward San Francisco.	In this dream, I was on a pullman train with Jeff. It was like the train I took to Washington, DC with my Mother and Aunt Sally when I was in Junior High. Jeff and I were in the top bunk. I put my hands on his body. It was dark, and the train rocked gently on the tracks as it moved swiftly along towards San Francisco.

Lexia 70

Version 3.3

Version 5.3

I dreamed that Jeff and I were lying on
the sand
beside the water on a small island in
Trinnywind
Harbor. I had taken off my bathingsuitand
was lying on my stomach. Jeff was
rubbing suntan
oil on my back and down the backs of
my
thighs.
He squeezed the bottle hard. A lot of
suntan oil
gushed out, and he gently guided it
down
my ass
with his fingers. Then, he turned me
over.

I dreamed that Jeff and I were lying
on the sand
beside the water on a small island in
Trinnywind
Harbor. I had taken off my
bathingsuit and
was lying on my stomach. Jeff was
rubbing suntan
oil on my back and down the sides of
my thighs.
This is listed as no 73; not listed as
#70.
This one is #70:
The swimming pool in my dream
was surrounded by an ivy covered
fence and large maple trees.
The grass was bright yellow-green.
Jeff tossed me the beach ball.
I dropped it.

Lexia 1 is the first evoked when querying or linking to the keyword “Jenny” In both Versions 5 and 3.3. While both describe Jenny and Jeff making love, the line “his hands were on my nipples” is missing from Version 5. “Nipples” is a more specific and erotic part of the body than “breasts,” which may explain why the line is cut. In lexia 17 of Version 3.3 we find the two lines, “He was biting my nipples. / I put my hand on his cock.” In Version 5 Jenny and Jeff still make love, but now lovemaking is only suggested by circumstance—the characters are alone in a “bunk” in the “dark”—and the line, “I put my hands on his body.” In Version 3.3’s lexia 70 Jenny and Jeff engage in foreplay on the beach; he rubs her “ass” with “suntan oil” and then “turns her over.” In the corresponding lexia in Version 5, Jeff rubs the “oil” on Jenny’s “back” and “thighs.”

We also see significant changes to Uncle Roger in Version 5. Notably missing are allusions to pedophilia and incest found in lexias 5, 11, and 34 of Version 3.3. The first two of these recount a story Jenny heard from her cousin Anne about Uncle Roger, which may not be true. The third is reported, firsthand, by Jenny herself, who, as we know, is not a reliable narrator. The rumors about Uncle Roger may well be hearsay, but even so, this kind of behavior is not even raised in Version 5.

Lexia 5

Version 3.3	Version 5.3
One night, at his summer house, in Cape Cod, he tried to get into bed with my cousin Anne. My mother thought he was sleep walking, but I didn’t, because when I went out to the bathroom, Uncle Roger was standing by the fire, smiling—with not hing on but a Dartmouth sweatshirt and a big hard.	I remembered a round tray of buffalo chicken wings on a marble coffee table, beside a silver candle holder bearing pink candles. Uncle Roger eating chicken wings, one after another, putting the bones in a small pile beside coffee table books about Michelangelo and Rembrandt.

Lexia 11

Version 3.3

Version 5.3

Uncle Roger usually wears tweed suits
which looks
like he has had them for a long time.
He is short and pudgy, and when I was
younger I
thought his briefcase was glued to his right
hand. Although they were brothers, Uncle
Roger is
nothing like my father who died in a car
crash on
route 128 when I was 7.
My cousin Anne who sometimes
exaggerates,
say Uncle Roger tied her to a bed once.
It was one of those beds with pineapples
on the
bedknobs. He tied her hands and feet too
the pineapples. Then he said, “take off al
l your
clothes.”

Uncle Roger usually wears tweed
suits which look
as if he has had them for a long
time.
He is short and plump, and when
I was younger,
I thought that his briefcase was
glued to his right hand.
Because one day when we picked
him up at the station,
he said to my Mother: “Given that
I live on the train,
I wish that they would serve
martinis,”
I also thought
that he lived on the Boston &
Maine.

Lexia 34

Version 3.3

Version 5.3

My Grandfather Grandy is the other Clark
in Clarkand Clark. Grandy speaks Latin fluently
and
remembers things about the Greek and Persian Wars
That I have already forgotten even though
I
majored in history.
He asks me questions like “What do you
think of
Cesare Borgia?
”Uncle Roger asks questions like
“Have you ever seen a grown man’s
penis?”
Or, “What do you do with boys now,
Jenny?”

My Grandfather Grandy is the
other Clark in Clark and Clark.
Grandy speaks Latin fluently
and remembers things about the
Greek and Persian Wars
that I have already forgotten even
though I majored in history.
He asks me questions like “Would
you like to discuss
Spartan naval strategies?”
Uncle Roger asks questions like
“Do you know the name of that
woman in the red dress
who isn’t wearing a bra?”

In lexias 5 and 11 of Version 3.3, we are told that Uncle Roger tried to get into bed with Anne and, later, “tied” her “hands and feet” to the bedpost with the (impractical) idea of having her strip naked for him. We are not certain of the relationship between the two; she may be his niece or his daughter. Neither of these passages is found in Version 5. Substituted are more benign descriptions of Uncle Roger playing with his food and his admission that he wished trains served martinis since he “lives” on them. Lexia thirty-four has Uncle Roger asking Jenny the inappropriate question about whether she had “ever seen a man’s penis” and what she is doing with “boys now.” In Version 5.3, these shift to expression of interest in a woman he notices. Though Uncle Roger’s question is not completely innocent—asking a young relative if she “know[s] the name of [a] woman” who may not be “wearing a bra”—he comes across more as libidinous than disreputable.

The keywords in the HTML source code for Version 5.2 examined in August 2015 demonstrate that Malloy did not intend to shy away from sexual content entirely:

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”hyperfiction,electronicliterature,narrative database,Silicon Valley,sex,unpredicatablerelatives,California culture, microelectronics, chip culture, industrial espionage, narrabase”>

“Sex” is the fifth of eleven keywords. However, the sex that we encounter in Version 5 is less graphic than that of Version 3, suggesting that Malloy strove to make Uncle Roger acceptable to a more mainstream audience.

Looking at the same meta-tags in March 2016, we find the word “sex” eliminated from the list. Malloy says of the change in sexual content:

In 1995, when I transferred the text to the Web, I thought that the sexually explicit dreams which pervade the narrative were unexpected on the Web and would be taken out of context in the cluttered Web environment, where only a few screens are sometimes read, and (at that time) suddenly the audience was the general public.

I do not think it was a mistake to change the text for the Web version at that time. … The issue of the public literature of the Web versus the literature of small presses is cogent. Perhaps one might look at the difference between Mark Amerika’s Sexual Blood and his Grammatron. Or even some of the passages in Victory Garden as opposed to what Stuart [Moulthrop] writes on the Web. (Malloy, email to Grigar, July 4, 2015).

We can also relate the sexual content to the fact that “scene-based Renaissance comedy was influential not only in the method but also in the ‘jig’ content that sometimes occurs in Uncle Roger” (McKeever 2014b).

Also changed in Version 5 are Jenny and Louise. Gone are the nightmares Jenny experiences in lexias 18 and 51 of Version 3.3, which portray her as tormented and fragile.

Lexia 18

Version 3.3	Version 5.3
There was a gangster on the train because we had stolen some money that was really ours from his safe. He knew Jeff and I were in there, in the compartment on the train. The gangster had connections with all the banks so we couldn’t deposit the money when we got to San Francisco. He knew all the landlords, too, and he kept in touch with them with his computer.	I dreamed that Jeff and I were standing in a shallow pool. The water came up to our waists. Along the edges of the pool were blue green tiles with handpainted pictures of birds and fish and flowers. Jeff was holding a multicolored beachball in his hands. I was wearing an old blue bathing suit that was a little too small for me.

Lexia 51

Version 3.3

Version 5.3

I dreamed that Jeff and I were at a party on
a
cruise ship. Rows of glasses shone in the sun
on
the shelves of the ships’ mahogany bar.
I was disguised as a cigarette girl.
When I went to the bathroom, the gang
ster was there. He was big and dark,
he didn’t have any face.
He ripped the cigarette tray form my chest.
I was wearing a shiny green bathing suit.
He pulled me roughly to him and pulled
down the top.
“Do you know Jeff Gallagher?” I asked Jane.
“A nice, solid guy,” said Jane. “Have you
heard
anything from David?” she asked, looking
at me
seriously over the tops of her glasses.

I dreamed that Jeff and I were at
a party on a cruise ship.
Rows of glasses shone in the sun
on the shelves of the ship’s
mahogany bar.
I was disguised as a cigarette girl.
When I went to the bathroom,
the Secretary of Defense was
there.
He helped himself to a cigarette.
I was wearing a shiny green
bathing suit.
“Do you know Jeff Gallagher?” I
asked Jane
at the party.
“A nice, solid guy,” said Jane.
“Have you heard anything from
David?” she asked,
looking at me seriously over the
tops of her glasses.

In Version 5, the nightmare involving the gangster and the frustration of not being able to deposit the money she and Jeff stole from him is replaced by a more pleasant memory of Jenny and Jeff playing in a pool together. That the bathing suit was “a little too small” speaks to insecurities, but certainly this dream depicts a far less anxious Jenny than the one suggested in Version 3.3. In that version Jenny’s nightmare about the gangster continues in lexia 51, when he gets violent with Jenny, “rip[ping] the cigarette tray” from her “chest” and “pull[ing] down the top.” Version 5 shifts from nightmare to dream, with the gangster replaced by the “Secretary of Defense.” Jenny is still wearing a “green bathing suit,” but this time there is no mention of its improper fit or of the man accosting her. The subsequent exchange between Jenny and her friend Jane reminds us that Jenny is still bothered by her unresolved conflict with ex-boyfriend David, but her worries play out in her sleep with less violence in Version 5 than in Version 3.3.

Finally, the formerly jealous, mean-spirited Louise becomes simply indifferent to Jenny. Lexias twenty-one and sixty-five exemplify this transformation:

Lexia 21

Version 3.3

Version 5.3

Tom Broadthrow was in Colorado
Springs
when Jeff Gallagher picked us up—
Louise,
Caroline, Mark, and me—
at the San Francisco airport two weeks
ago. Louise did not introduce me. “Mark,
you may sit up front with Jeff and me,”
she said.
I reached for the back door handle. Jeff
was there first. He opened the door.
“How do you
do? I’m Jeff,” he said.
“I’m Jenny,” I stammered, tripping over
my
pocketbook as I followed Caroline into
the back
seat.
“Our babysitter,” said Louise.

Tom Broadthrow was in Colorado
Springs when Jeff Gallagher picked
us up
— Louise, Caroline, Mark, and me —
at the San Francisco airport two
weeks ago.
Louise did not introduce me.
I reached for the back door handle.
Jeff’s hand was there first.

Lexia 65

Version 3.3	Version 5
“Jenny, it’s time for you to take Caroline up,” said Louise who was suddenly standing over us. “Why hello, Jeff.” There’s some people I‘d like you to meet.”	Jeff kept on talking about semiconductors. I lost track of time. “Jenny, it’s time for you to read Caroline her story,” Suddenly Louise who was hovering over us. “Why hello, Jeff. There’s some people I’d like you to meet.”

In lexia 21 of Version 3.3, Louise relegates Jenny to the backseat of the car, favoring instead her husband, Jeff, and sixteen-year-old son. In Version 5 there is no mention of seating arrangement. Thus, the edit eliminates Louise’s poor treatment of Jenny, and the scene focuses, instead on Jenny and Jeff’s first encounter. In Version 3.3 of lexia 65 Louise interrupts Jenny and Jeff’s conversation at the party, “suddenly standing over” them and telling Jenny to take Caroline to bed. Louise quickly shifts her attention to Jeff, telling him that she wants to introduce him to “some people.” The suggestion here is that she purposely breaks up the conversation, perhaps discounting Jenny as someone with whom Jeff may—or should—enjoy meeting and talking. Louise comes across differently in Version 5. The addition of the first two sentences contextualizes the situation and explains that Louise may have been anxious about Caroline’s bed time. In any case, it is clear that Louise considers Jenny an employee rather than a guest at the party.

In Version 5 of Terminals we learn that Jenny has left her job as Caroline’s babysitter and now works for a word processing firm on Embarcadero Square in San Francisco, where she—along with a pool of a lot of other women—watches the clock and struggles to enter data properly on the computer. Even though Jenny has left the Broadthrow home, she remains embroiled in the scheming surrounding BroadthrowMicro. Her continued involvement with Tom and Louise gains her an invitation to their residence for a Christmas party, where much of the action in Terminals takes place. Like the gathering in A Party in Woodside, this party is also lively and full of intrigue—and food. We find cookies “shaped like stars” on “silver plates,” cakes, and cheese balls.

Memories of her family enter in and out of the narrative: their hemlock Christmas tree, her mother’s red candles, and her brother eating popcorn from the bowl they shared. David, her former lover, appears in her mind like a specter. She remembers him talking about the studio he had been crashing at, a memory that gives way to other memories unassociated with him. Uncle Roger figures importantly in Terminals, remaining the center of conflict involving the pirated chip. Though he fails to convince Jenny to work at his company, Clark and Clark, he tries to urge upon her romance with one of his successful young business associates. The word “chip” takes shape in Jenny’s mind as “Hawaiian potato chips,” as “Haitian chips,” as Jeff’s pilfered chip. At some point during the party, Jeff storms into the house angry about the stolen chip. He attacks Tom and slugs Uncle Roger, bruising his face. Jenny recalls making love to Jeff in a room, at “an old fort overlooking San Francisco Bay” and in a “shallow pool” of water.

The drudgery Jenny experiences in her job feeds her dreams. In one, she finds herself in a room with concrete walls. She thinks of her old house, her trip back home to Boston with Uncle Roger, her mother’s car with the broken heater. Jenny recounts a dream where she and Jeff encounter a sleeping lion. She remembers Uncle Roger’s admission to Jeff that he has the chip. Readers might evoke one lexia after another, repeating some memories, encountering others only once—or never—until they come to one that forces them to rethink their opinion of Uncle Roger: at the airport he reveals to Jenny that he has signed over to Jeff the company he built from pirating his chip. Uncle Roger’s last words, which end the story, are “Merry Christmas!” “Pudgy” and jolly, though hard-drinking and libidinous, Uncle Roger is Santa Claus for a late twentieth and early twenty-first century audience apparently comfortable with intellectual property pirates as antiheroes.

We do not know the outcome of Jenny’s romance with Jeff, but that does not seem to be the point of the story. What we really come to understand is that Jenny is able to move forward with her life. She is able to adapt to the West Coast, land one job and then a second, leave an unhealthy relationship and risk herself for one that may turn out better. Once an employee in the Broadthrow home, by the end, she is a guest. She comes to some resolution with Uncle Roger. She is his confidant, privy to espionage and piracy without losing her cool. The story may be named after the man, but it belongs to the woman who grows up before our eyes and begins to understand the complexities of life.

Version 6: The DOSBox Version

In 2012 Malloy created an edition of Version 4 in DOSBox, an emulator of the Disk Operating System (DOS) that makes it possible to “re-live” vintage media built for platforms now outdated (“DOSBox,” 2015). The point of an emulator is to “duplicate features of one computing system using the resources of another so as to imitate behaviors of the first system as closely as possible” (Harpold 2009, 4). With DOSBox readers of Version 6 experience the IBM-compatible system for which the database narrative of Version 4 was built. As discussed earlier, Version 3, specifically Versions 3.1–3.3, was originally built for the Apple IIe in Applesoft BASIC, but Malloy found she needed a version of Uncle Roger that could be shown in exhibitions where IBM-compatible computers were used, so she converted the files to Microsoft’s GW-BASIC. That version of the work, we argued earlier, constitutes Version 4.1. Because DOSBox uses this same dialect of BASIC, the emulation of Uncle Roger available through the Uncle Roger website is actually developed from Version 4.1 (Malloy, email to Grigar, July 4, 2015).

But there is more going on than merely translating Uncle Roger from standalone artists’ software running on a 5.25-inch floppy disk to an emulator. Malloy uses the Version 5 text, rather than that of version 4.1, for the emulation (Malloy, email to Grigar, July 4, 2015). Thus both A Party in Woodside and The Blue Notebook function as database novels with the two-keyword search, and Terminals remains a generative text in which readers encounter random lexias along with a fixed beginning and ending lexia. The content has changed, but the functionality has not, perhaps reflecting her interest in toning down later versions. The DOSBox emulator is made available for download from the website that also contains Version 5, so it makes sense that both versions have the same content. Essentially what Malloy did to produce Version 6 was replace Version 4.1 content with Version 5 content, while retaining Version 4.1 programming.

While Malloy provides detailed directions for how to set up the emulator, the activity still requires a fair amount of comfort with a terminal emulator and the command shell of a computer. After mounting DOSBox and Uncle Roger, readers are taken to the opening screen, where the menu is displayed. As the program loads, the emulator treats readers to the whirring of a computer loading the program, a sound that captures, to a certain extent, the experience of reading the story on a vintage machine. Along with sound, a title produced in ASCII appears briefly before readers are taken to the opening screen (figure 2.8).

Figure 2.8 Opening screen of DOSBox Emulation of *Uncle Roger.*

The screen contains the menu, which presents the title and author and the first line from Record No. 1 of A Party in Woodside. Next is the list of three files followed by simple directions for reading the story. Typing “1” takes readers to the opening page of that file, where they find twenty keywords in lower-case letters arranged in three rows of seven, seven, and six (figure 2.9). Choosing “jenny,” readers are asked if they want to combine this keyword with another. Typing “no,” results in the program taking readers directly to a lexia. All the while, the emulator continues its whirring noises as each file loads.

Figure 2.9 Opening screen of file 1 of *Uncle Roger.*

Since Version 6 borrows the database narrative structure of Version 4 as it was articulated in GW-BASIC, we can get a sense from the emulation of what Version 4.1 may have entailed. Furthermore, comparing Version 6.1 with others—Versions 3.3 and 5.3—also may provide insights into Version 4.1. For example, we see that the opening screen of Version 6.1 is missing the contextual information provided in Version 3.3. This information is also missing in Version 5 and its updates, where readers are taken to an opening screen with fifteen keywords and directions for reading the story. Version 6.1 offers twenty keywords, the same as Version 3.3 but arranged differently; the earlier version has four rows of five instead of three rows of seven, seven, and six. More importantly, Version 6.1 does not require readers to combine a second keyword with “jenny,” as in Version 3.3, where all action involving others—people, places, and things—is predicated on what Jenny wants to share about them and on her perspective about their contribution to the story. In a sense Version 3.3 confers upon Jenny a primacy not reflected so firmly in the versions that follow. True, Jenny’s name appears first on the list for all versions of Uncle Roger, but her role as storyteller stands out most in Version 3.3.

Another notable difference, one that improves upon the reading experience of Version 3.3, is the extended line length. As pointed out previously, Malloy had created the interactive narrative of Uncle Roger—that is, Version 2—with a fifty-character line length as required by ACEN Datanet’s system. The Apple IIe, however, came standard with a forty-character column length. When Malloy created Version 3, the line length programmed in Version 2 persisted, causing lines to break in Version 3.3 in odd ways. Record No. 1 in Version 3.3, for example, reads:

I drank too much red wine.

The Broadthrow’s party is looping in my

mind,

nested with brief dreams and nightmares.

I dreamed that Jeff and I were in bed.

He was running his hands up and down my

body.

He put his tongue in my mouth.

His hands were on my nipples.

He ran his fingers down the inside of my

thighs.

But in the morning, he wanted fruit for

breakfast.

I didn’t have any fruit.

There was some broccoli behind the cookb

ooks,

but when I pulled it out,

it was covered with cockroaches.

Line two breaks after the word “my,” pushing “mind” to its own line. Lines five, eight, nine, and eleven also feature unusual breaks, with line eleven breaking “cookbook” not between syllables but between letters in the same syllable.

In Version 6.1, the odd line breaks are gone:

I drank too much red wine.

The Broadthrow’s party is looping in my mind,

nested with brief dreams and nightmares.

I dreamed that Jeff and I were in bed.

He was running his hands up and down my body.

He put his tongue in my mouth. His hands were on my breasts.

He ran his fingers down the inside of my thighs.

We made love.

In the morning, he wanted a cheese omlette,

but there was no cheese in the refrigerator.

The story flows, and lines end in logical places, marked by commas and periods.

Emulators provide an important service by allowing readers access to works that otherwise may not be available—certainly DOSBox emulation enables readers a sense of how the story in Version 4 unfolds as a database narrative. However, emulators cannot completely capture the cultural experience of the original. They offer translations and, as such, betray a work as much as they support it. As William Weaver writes in a contribution to the collection The Process of Translation, “There are no perfect solutions. You simply do your best” (Weaver 1989, 119). The clever adage, Traduttore e traditore, suggests that no matter how hard a translator works to recreate the original experience, he or she is always on some level a traitor to the text (Keeley 1989, 54).

What of Uncle Roger has been betrayed when emulating Version 4? Missing from Version 6.1 are the green ASCII letters of the IBM 286 and green monitor of the Apple IIe (figure 2.10)—the one reflected in the story Jenny tells and the one with which readers were well familiar and may have been using themselves. Missing also is the computer itself, whose design acted as a breadcrumb linking the physicality of typewriters and paper to the ephemeral world of digital information. The heavy and dull tan cases of these early computers have given way to the sleek, silver bodies of contemporary laptops. Even on today’s desktop, with its large-screen monitor, emulators are noticeably small and strange, like aliens from another world. One can enlarge the screen by pressing the alt + enter keys, but this function is not listed in the directions; readers would have to know about it by some other means.

Figure 2.10 IBM 286 and the interface for *Uncle Roger* for the Apple IIe.

Those of us who make art on computers may not be aware that what we create is framed by the material surrounding it. Taking the work out of the frame is like moving it into another context that may not correlate with the work, may not help with its translation for a new audience. For a work such as Uncle Roger, set in the Silicon Valley of the 1980s and aimed at an audience of tech-savvy computer specialists or experimental artists, nothing speaks to the period or carries the cultural context of the work better than the original platform.

a. Jenny	j. Dorrie	s. blue notebook
b. Jeff	k. Liz	t. bathroom
c. David	l. Dennis	u. restaurant
d. Uncle Roger	m. Jack	v. chips
e. Tom	n. Rose	w. beach
f. Louise	o. Mark	x. San Jose
g. cats	p. Caroline	y. Woodside
h. Linda	q. family	z. café
i. men in tan

JENNY	DORRIE	BLUE NOTEBOOK
JEFF	LIZ	BATHROOM
DAVID	DENNIS	RESTAURANT
UNCLE ROGER	JACK	CHIPS
TOM	ROSE	BEACH
LOUISE	MARK	SAN JOSE
LINDA	PUFFY	CAFÉ
MEN IN TAN	FAMILY	WOODSIDE
SALLY	CAROLINE

Line 1	I ate some shrimp. It had been barbequ	(40)
Line 2	ed in a	(7)
Line 3	dark red sauce which tasted like those	(39)
Line 4	spiced meat sticks called “slim jims” w	(40)
Line 5	hich my	(7)
Line 6	brother and I used take with us when we	(40)
Line 7	went out	(9)
Line 8	in Marblehead harbor in the old rowboat	(40)
Line 9	.	(1)
Line 10	“Hi, I’m Jake”	(15)
Line 11	said a man in a tan suit.	(26)

Line 1	I ate some shrimp. It had been barbequed in a	(46)
Line 2	dark red sauce which tasted like those	(39)
Line 3	spiced meat sticks called “slim jims” which my	(46)
Line 4	brother and I used take with us when we went out	(49)
Line 5	in Marblehead harbor in the old rowboat.	(40)
Line 6	“Hi, I’m Jake”	(14)
Line 7	said a man in a tan suit.	(25)

2 The Many Faces of Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger

Version 1: Serial Novel for the Net

Version 2: Interactive Narrative on the Net

Version 3: Uncle Roger as Standalone Artists’ Software for Apple Computers

The Blue Notebook

Version 4: Standalone Artists’ Software for IBM Compatible Computers

Version 5: Uncle Roger on the Web

Version 6: The DOSBox Version

Conclusion

Coda: Uncle Roger, Version—?

Acknowledgments

Notes