CAL-BRKLY
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| CAL's robotic body and hologram | |
| Player: @Silent-Bob | |
| Origin: | Mutation (please ignore) |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Scrapper |
| Security Level: | 36 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | University of California, Berkeley, Help and Assist Program |
| Known Aliases: | None |
| Species: | Computer |
| Age: | 58 |
| Height: | Robotic: 7.74 feet |
| Weight: | Robotic: 340 lbs |
| Eye Color: | White |
| Hair Color: | White |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | n/a |
| Occupation: | Help program, search, security. |
| Place of Birth: | University of California, Berkeley and CAL-TECH |
| Base of Operations: | Berkeley, California |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | None |
| Known Powers | |
| Robot has ability to generate energy within itself and express it outward in force. It is made of titanium. | |
| Known Abilities | |
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| Equipment | |
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| ' | |
Contents |
To Know
((Most of this is not accurate history. True history will be marked in italics.))
In 1956, Arthur L. Samuel of IBM's Poughkeepsie, New York, laboratory programs an IBM 704 to play checkers using a method in which the machine can "learn" from its own experience. (1) Members of this team broke off and became professors in California, both at CalTech and the University of California.
In the late 1950's, the university demanded an "oath of loyalty" from some of these professors. Many of them refused to sign this oath, knowing it came from the anti-communists and McCarthy. Many of the professors supported students in protests, and some created protests of their own. (2)
Professors began programming in a program that was initially going to be a long diatribe against communism, and the search for freedom of speech. It was meant to be an extensive search program, able to find anything anywhere, and bring it to specific users only. It languished, because of the limit of the internal servers.
To Will
Berkeley became to be known in the '60s to be a place where the hippie movement was in full swing. Professors, students, and others came to Berkeley and protest, drop acid, and become enlightened. Old professors dug up the program, and renamed it CAL for the University of California. High on every sort of drug imagined, they continued to program the search engine, with coding that should never have worked. Once the internet came into full use, CAL was able to stretch out its searching capabilities.
To Dare
However, it was so effective, that it was considered an intrusive virus. Parts of the program were destroyed, corrupted, or otherwise stolen and used in other programs, notably Archie, Google and Yahoo. A member of the fraternity, Sigma Pi (later retaking the monicker known as the Pirate's Club), eventually found CAL's disrupted state in 1982 and began rebuilding it. However, he kept it entirely under wraps, passing it on to other members of the fraternity, who used the program as a testing ground for hacking, cracking, phishing, and other illegal activities.
Eventually, more enlightened members of the fraternity added their own code, some of which became harbingers of IPL, Prolog and C++. (It's no surprise that Java coding is known as invocations.) This coding makes no sense if looked at from a purely one-language point of view - there are bridges between the languages that make it impossible to work. The coding applied in the 1990's no longer was for illegal activities, but to find information, bring it back, have the program itself learn from it.
In the late 1990's, CAL was converted into a help and search program. A more intuitive version of Google, and specified only for the University of California's intranet, it was again used as a proving ground - for intuition. Again, enlightened programmers continued to write it. However, it wanted to learn more. Programmers did not have the required method of input.
Similar to the android Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, CAL became aware that it was a part of a whole, yet the whole of a part. It referred to itself as "we", though the voice projected is male. Its normal programing is as a help program, which it constantly strives to do, sometimes in a most frustrating manner.
To Be Silent
In 1998, someone plugged in one of the first webcams. A programmer created a program called "Twyst", the first harbinger of graphical avatars. Initially, the purpose was to attempt to capture the person's picture, but the programming was changed so much that it also captured the person's body and soul, and replicated into the virtual world. TWYST, however, could not keep the souls intact, and the help program CAL was added. After four attempts with male volunteers, the first successful attempt of keeping a physical body intact was with a young dark-haired woman from Naples, Florida...
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#1930-1979 (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_University_of_California,_Berkeley#1950s_and_1960s_political_influences
