October 23, 1995

The technology riddle of the day is far from trivial: How do you build safe
and private places for communities and commerce without closing in the
wide open
spaces of the global Internet?

A reunited team of software designers in a Silicon Valley enclave solved the
first half of the riddle more than a decade ago.

And while updating their old system for the Internet, they are designing a
radical new operating system for cyberspace that may finish the job.

The company, called Electric Communities, was founded in 1993 by
three former
Lucasfilm employees, Douglas Crockford, Chip Morningstar and Randall Farmer.
Morningstar and Farmer created Habitat – still considered the first and best
example of a virtual world production company – in 1985. A decade later, their
expertise in the arcane problems of networked electronic communities
makes their
project a potential David among software Goliaths like Netscape and Microsoft.

Habitat is a multiplayer game that Morningstar and Farmer built for Quantum
Link, an on-line service for Commodore 64 computer owners that grew
into America
Online. (More on Habitat can be found on the the Electric Communities Web site,

http://www.communities.com.)

Though most people remember it for its use of avatars, an electronic
representation of a Habitat user in cyberspace, Habitat was also remarkable
because its users eventually created a virtual world that mirrored reality.
People married, played games, started businesses and set up financial scams
using token currency; gangs of hackers even took over whole sections of
electronic turf.

Eventually Morningstar and Farmer left Lucasfilm and Habitat to build
software for American Information Exchange, or Amix, the first on-line service
that allowed buyers and sellers to negotiate deals electronically.

Crockford, who had provided “advice and comfort” from his office next to
Morningstar’s, also eventually left Lucasfilm to work at Paramount
Pictures’ now
defunct research lab in Palo Alto, Calif.

But when the buzz about virtual communities started up a couple years back,
Crockford, Morningstar and Farmer reunited to revive Habitat – this time on the
Internet. In the process, they hatched a really big idea – to create an
operating system for cyberspace that fixed the old problems of the original
Habitat, and the new problems of security and privacy on the net.

Crockford said they decided to avoid getting involved with another service
like America Online because they wanted to eliminate the need for one
company to
create and support thousands of environments, as Lucasfilm had done in the
1980s.

“It was hard even in an organization as good as Lucasfilm to get enough
good, fresh ideas on a large enough scale,” said Crockford. “We
wanted to give
users the tools to build their own hangouts in cyberspace. But in order
to do it
right, we had to solve some problems of decentralization and security. And when
we did, we realized the solutions had applications way beyond what we
were doing
in Habitat.”

Work began in 1993 on what they called the Cyberspace Operating System, or
COS, designed to manage the resources of shared computing – like security and
bandwidth – just as operating systems like Macintosh OS or Windows 95
manage the
resources inside a desktop PC.

To do so, the programming team at Electric Communities is inventing some
technology, including a programming language (compatible with Sun Microsystems’
new Java language for Internet applications) and a design concept for software
building blocks which it is in the process of patenting. In addition, staff
cryptographers are weaving encryption throughout the system to make it
absolutely secure and private.

Such a design makes great sense in a time when computers and software are
changing so quickly that they are often obsolete as soon as they’re sold.

Imagine if a network game updated itself when you bought a more powerful
computer, or if you no longer needed to find and download the latest version of
a browser to visit richly designed sites on the web.

“Anything you ask for comes to you, and anything breakable is
replaceable,”
Crockford said. “We want the system to last a long time.”

Electric Communities will give away the specifications for COS to attract
developers and will sell software tools that allow both consumers and
developers
to create virtual worlds or commercial enterprises. The company will
also set up
a commercial Habitat-style turf and an electronic commerce system similar to
Amix to show how COS works.

It hopes to release some components of the COS in early 1996. The
programming
language and remaining components, he said, will be released with the
commercial
Habitat service some time in 1997.

But a year is a lifetime in today’s Internet avalanche. And with such a
radical design, Electric Communities may have some tough sledding ahead.

Denise Caruso

c.1995 N.Y. Times News Service