Neuromancer
Timothy Leary was nothing if not an early adopter. He's best known for his starring role in the psychedelic revolution of the '60s, but in the '80s and '90s he became captivated by the transformative potential of personal computers and the Internet. [Leary's archives](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/timothy-leary-archives/), which have just become available to the public, are filled with digital surprises -- including MacPaint artwork by Keith Haring and several self-help programs that might be considered crude precursors to modern brain-training software.
Leary's archive at the New York Public Library contains more than 300 floppy discs containing notes on everything from cybersex to cryogenics, letters to famous actors and artists, and videogames in various stages of development.
Leary coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out" in the '60s, urging people to explore consciousness and embrace individual freedom with or without the aid of psychedelic drugs. At the dawn of the Internet age, he amended that slogan to: "turn on, boot up, jack in."
"Psychedelics open the brain to more input and 'cyberspace' was doing the same thing, plus we were supplying the input for each other, so it would have a kind of human intimacy," said Ken Goffman, aka R.U. Sirius, a long-time associate and author of [a biography about Leary](http://timothyleary.org/).
"He saw computer games as a way to help people understand their psyches and interpersonal dynamics and for them to be a bit strategic about changing what wasn't working for them," Goffman said. "He was also excited by the notion that people could hack into and cut up the entertainment that was being fed to them by the industry."
One of Leary's programs, *Mind Mirror*, was released by Electronic Arts in 1985. It wasn't quite the smash hit that *Madden NFL* became, but it did sell 65,000 copies in its first two years, and it [lives on today as a Facebook app](https://apps.facebook.com/mindmirrordevsb/). The original Mind Mirror uses a bunch of questionnaires (and some groovy '70s lingo) to create a personalized psychological profile of you and your ideal self.
Several other programs were in various stages of development. They provide a digital flashback to a time when graphics were amusingly crude and games relied heavily on text.
They may not be flashy, but the games are often intentionally funny, said Lisa Rein, who helped maintain Leary's archives before they were sold to the library, and who co-runs [a blog about them](http://www.timothylearyarchives.org/). "They're very tongue-in-cheek, making fun of you and himself and even the computer," Rein said.
Some, like the [*Neuromancer* project](http://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/01/25/transmissions-timothy-leary-papers-keith-haring-mind-movie), were meant to be software companions to books, allowing users to play different characters or determine the plot -- much like a choose-your-own-adventure book. Others use questionnaires to create psychometric personality plots (some of these use unusual variables, ranging from "Not Ronald Reagan" to "Ronald Reagan" on the horizontal axis, and from "Not John Lennon" to "John Lennon" on the vertical axis, for example). Often, the goal seems to be to encourage players to adopt other personalities and role-play different characters.
To recover them from Leary's disks, digital archivist Donald Mennerich and intern Alison Rhonemus used tools more commonly used by police departments to extract data from devices without tampering with the evidence. "In forensics, they care about the chain of custody, and it's the same idea -- we want to make sure we're not changing anything," Mennerich said.
They used a device called a Kryoflux to make disk images of Leary's floppies, many of them the truly floppy 5 1/4 inch kind. Then they used an imposing black box called FRED -- a [Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device](http://www.digitalintelligence.com/products/fred/) -- to identify the file types and extract text and other data from the disks. Software that emulates DOS and other old operating systems makes it possible to play the games, and the library plans to make a terminal available to the public so people can try them out.
Even FRED has its limits, though. "A few disks had coffee rings on them," Rhonemus said. "Those obviously didn't play."
And for some reason FRED has struggled to read some files written with Word 3 for Mac. "I hope that might turn into a research project for someone so we can figure it out," Mennerich said.
Mennerich says he has no idea what might be in those files, but Leary's other files contain a trove of notes and correspondence. Given the connections Leary cultivated throughout his life with artists, scientists, celebrities, and perhaps even high-ranking politicians, it seems certain that his digital archives contain many gems just waiting to be discovered.
*Images: Neuromancer screenshot (NYPL Manuscripts & Archives Division); Donald Mennerich and Alison Rhonemus (Alex Welsh/WIRED)*
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