Uncle Roger

"Judy Malloy is an electronic literature poet/researcher. An essential piece of electronic literature and software history, Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger was first released in 1986 (File 1: A Party in Woodside). The interactive version, which allowed keyword searching was first programmed by Malloy in UNIX shell scripts and published online on Art Com Electronic Network's Datanet in early 1987. In the same year, Malloy programmed A Party in Woodside in BASIC. This version was packaged and sold via Art Com's video art catalog, as well as exhibited in Canada in Ultimatum II, Images du Futur '87. Three file versions were built in both UNIX Shell scripts and BASIC and were published online on Datanet and exhibited in 1988 at Tisch ITP and ARS Electronica. File 2 allowed for Boolean logic and File 3 was generative. The work is part of some of the first discussions of the potential for software as art and draws on Judy Malloy's experience in database programming. It makes use of a node-based model of molecular narrative units that, when combined, allow for non-sequential storytelling. Both the UNIX Shell Script version and the BASIC version had an interactive interface that allowed the user to navigate through keyword-based interfaces and combine the database entries to explore the text nodes.

Each file contains several threads of different stories centered on the Silicon Valley tech industry: A Party in Woodside is a dream-like memory of a party of CEOs viewed from the perspective of the babysitter; The Blue Notebook combines a birthday party with fragments of remembered and recounted narrative as chronicled by the babysitter in her notebook; and Terminals follows the narrator to her new job at a market research firm where thoughts and memories emerge at random." -- From Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3