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Crowther's Original Adventure Source Code Found
drxenos writes "I don't know how many of you are fans of old-school text adventures (interactive fiction), but Will Crowther's original Fortran source code has been located in a backup of Don Woods's old student account. For fans like me, this is like finding the Holy Grail."
Pleased to be telling me, is it running on linux?
Will code for new sig.
For nurds like me, this is like finding the Holy Grail
It's early. .
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
4chan is responsible. Who else would call FORTRAN a "text adventure"?
yeah, can't say I'm anything other than a rogue, nethack, moria, umoria fan. the modern games with their "animation" and "pictures" and "sound" are just too easy.
I looked at the various FORTRAN files and am amazed at the spaghetti GOTO maze which, although messy, was probably the only way to do things in FORTRAN at the time with no structuring capability.
A random example:
IF(K.NE.1) MASK1="177*M2(K)
IF(((A(J).XOR."201004020100).AND.MASK1).EQ.0)GOTO 3
IF(S.EQ.0) GOTO 2
Wow! Is that the opposite of self-documenting code or what?
Bad, bad Zoot. I'm sorry that's just the grail shaped light.
And soon a free version with "clean room" (yeah right) source code and the exact same designs will suddenly appear called Linadventure, driving the original version out of business on a wave of proto-socialist bandwagonism.
I once wrote a script to find and delete copies of this and the star trek game due to the limited disk space on our PDP-11/70. It had to compare file contents because the sneaky bastards would change the file names to something like TPSRPORT.DOC to hide them.
I'll wait till it's reviewed on Penny Arcade.
xyzzy
I've never seen this game or anything like it. (too young) It sounds to me to be like one of those interactive books. It would seem to be a little easier to go the book route than to have to mess around with 70's era computers. How this was successful at all is a wonder.
The game.
Had to go to wiki for this one...
William ("Willie" or "Will") Crowther (born 1936) is a computer programmer and caver. He is best known as the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of game design and created a new game genre, text adventures.
[edit] Biography
During the early 1970s Crowther worked at defense contractor and Internet pioneer Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). Following his divorce from his wife Patricia, Crowther began using his spare time to develop a simple text-based adventure game in FORTRAN on BBN's PDP-10. He created it as a diversion his daughters Sandy and Laura could enjoy when they came to visit. (Montfort, 2003, pp. 85-87)
In Adventure, the player moves around an imaginary cave system by entering simple, two-word commands and reading text describing the result. Crowther used his extensive knowledge of cave exploration as a basis for the game play, and there are many similarities between the locations in the game and those in Mammoth Cave, particularly its Bedquilt section. (Montfort, 2003, p. 88) In 1975 Crowther released the game on the early ARPANET system, of which BBN was a prime contractor. (Montfort, 2003, p. 89)
In the Spring of 1976, he was contacted by Stanford researcher Don Woods, seeking his permission to enhance the game. Crowther agreed, and Woods developed several enhanced versions on a PDP-10 housed in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) where he worked. (Montfort, 2003, p. 89) Over the following decade the game gained in popularity, being ported to many operating systems, including personal-computer platform CP/M.
The basic game structure invented by Crowther (and based in part on the example of the ELIZA text parser) was carried forward by the designers of later adventure games. Marc Blank and the team that created the Zork adventures cite Adventure as the title that inspired them to create their game. They later founded Infocom and published a series of popular text adventures.
The location of the game in Colossal Cave was not a coincidence. Will and his first wife Pat Crowther were active and dedicated cavers in the 1960s and early 1970s--both were part of many expeditions to connect the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems. Pat played a key role in the September 9, 1972 expedition that finally made the connection. (Brucker, 1976, p. 299)
Will has also played an important role in the development of rock climbing in the Shawangunks in New York State. He began climbing there in the 1950s and continues to climb today. He made the first ascent of several classic routes including Arrow, Hawk, Moonlight, and Senté. Some of these routes sparked controversy because protection bolts were placed on rappel; a new tactic that Crowther and a several others began to use at the time. The community reaction to this technique was an important part of the evolution of climbing ethics in the Shawangunks and beyond.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
I digged out my Transformers toys when the movie was out, but playing with them doesn't give me the same thrill as they did 20 years ago.
This, is probably the same.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
I may print it out and use it for wall paper. or etch it on silicon.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
but fortunately I had the source.
--
phunctor
But is it more like finding the Holy Grail or the Dead Sea Scrolls? Ancient scrolls stored in a cave sounds more appropriate . . .
Read it? y/n
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
I'll wait for the movie to come out...
Maybe a lot of today's nerds are too young to remember, but ADVENT was one of the most important computer games ever written. Its influence is still with us today, from mere hacker jargon to standard features of many modern games. Scoff if you want, but this discovery has historical significance. There has been a great deal of speculation and debate over the years about Crowther's and Woods's relative contributions to the game, and Crowther's source code puts numerous questions to rest. If the history of computers, and particularly of computer games, is at all a subject worthy of study, then this source code has to be considered a major find.
Those interactive books came about because of Adventure.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
An old copy of Creative Computing magazine had a spoof edition which, among other amusements, (IIRC) listed the entire source code for Adventure. I have it in storage somewhere; will dig it out this week and see if it matches TFA's discovery.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The adventure source is a great find. I've been looking for the Scheme source tarball from the 1986-1987 period (i.e. when SICP was still new) for over a year, with no success. The changelog is online, and shows the work that was done in that period, but none of the tarballs still exists. Anyone have a Scheme distribution tarball from late 1987? I would like to run the code from that time along with the book to do screen captures, etc for something I'm working on.
Even though they are obviously overtaken by Graphical MMOs like WoW, MUDs are still fairly prevalent. There are still thousands of active MUDs/MUSHs/MOOs/BBSs and (extremely hard to calculate accurately) roughly 15,000 active players in the community.
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
I'm old enough to remember, though I was a kid.
I'm not sure I can explain the sense of wonder. It was like the first time I got my modem working and realized I was _connected_to_another_computer! It was amazing to be able to type in a command or a question and have the computer _talk_back_to_you. Even though we all _knew_ it wasn't real AI, it felt like AI.
It wasn't the format of the _game_ that was special. Like was said, there were books that could do something similar. It was the fact that you were, basically, talking to a machine that was special.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Ironically, I used to have the source code to an adventure game called The Holy Grail. :-D
Comment removed based on user account deletion
2027 ON JVERB GOTO 9000,5066,3000,5031,2009,5031,9404,9406,5081,5200, 5200,5300,5506,5502,5504,5505
i.e. a multiple-branch GOTO where the destination depends on the value of JVERB. That extra "1" on the second line indicatates that line 2027 got split over two physical lines; FORTRAN dates back to the days of 80-column punch cards.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Now, I will finally be able to unlock the Hot Coffee mod.
What if the game was closed source or infested by DRM or saved in a proprietary format by a company that went bust two decades ago and whose products nobody had specs for?
And you beat me to it in posting. A true relic of the evolutionary dead ends in the history of computer science :)
This is why the grandmaster of 'Literate Programming', Donald Knuth, has done a translation into his CWEB Language which is totaly devoid of jumps and other 'dirty' Fortan:
http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
Take 4 of the most common styles of climbing*:
1. "aid" climbing.
The climber uses a rope, can pull on fixed protection, use etriers (a type of ladder) etc. Anything goes.
2. "sport" climbing.
The lead climber uses a rope, and protects himself by clipping it to fixed bolts attached to the rock. He (or she) only uses the bolts for protection - moving upwards is only achieved by climbing the rock.
3. "Traditional climbing"
The lead climber uses a rope, and protects himself py placing his own protection. This consists of "nuts" (metal wedges), "friends" (spring loaded camming devices) and other stuff. The climber who comes up second removes the protection.
4. "solo" climbing.
No rope, no protection, just you and the rock. Fall off from too high up and you will probably die.
Now to the ethics:
If a climb is usually led as a "trad" climb then it is very bad form to turn up with a drill and put a line of bolts on it. Climbing it solo or trad is "good style", bolting it or aiding is poor style.
Similarly you don't get many points for aiding a sport route, although soloing it or bypassing the bolts and using traditional protection is good.
Essentially climbing ethics comes down to respecting the local climbers, not doing anything to ruin peoples routes (bolting is irreversible), and not cheating.
Most climbers, when faced with a climb they aren't competent to lead, will walk away and come back when they are ready. Some will come back in the night with a cold chisel and hammer and cut themselves some extra holds - at a stroke destroying the challenge every future climber.
Now that is unethical.
*i know there are others.
Cool story.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This was fun. I remember running it on a teletype terminal in programming class (damn, thats old) BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG. You couldn't do a quick CLS to hide the evidence when the instructor came by, "Do you think paper grows on trees?" he yell. Of course all was forgiven when we showed him our course work was done. Then, he made us write our own dungeon code.
Much later, Don Brown(?) came out with EAMON, with a write your own framework. Fun fun fun.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
So how long before someone writes an IF game that involves exploring the real caves and finding the source code about an IF game called Adventure thats about exploring the caves?
...of twisty FORTRAN spaghetti code, all alike. You are likely to be eaten by an IBM punchcard reader
People renaming files to .DOC in the PDP-11 era? Yeah, right...
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds !"
program smite_em
c-----
IMPLICIT NONE ! Catch typos and un-initialized variables.
integer IERR_smite
character*200 ch_name
c-----
write(6,1)
1 FORMAT(/,' This is one smiting program!',/,
& ' Enter name of smitee --> ',$)
read(*,fmt='(A)') ch_name
DO while(.TRUE.) ! Endless smiting loop.
call smite(ch_name, IERR_smite)
if(IERR_smite.GT.0) goto 20
End DO ! smite loop.
20 CONTINUE
write(*,*)' Done smiting.'
if(IERR_smite.LT.0) then
write(6,2) IERR_smite
2 FORMAT(' ***Possible smiting error, IERR_smite = ',I)
endif
STOP
END
c-----
c End of Main.
c-----
For those of you who don't want to read through the google groups archive (I recommend you do, but this is slashdot), here are some relevant links:
Original source, ported to g77
The above, compiled as a windows binary
I'm not sure about the PDP-11 era, but as early as the mid-80's it was common to use .doc to indicate that something was a general document as opposed to a .ltr, .mem, or the like. The word processor used was irrelevant. (We used XyWrite at the time.) MS Word commandeering .doc is a relatively new phenomenon - the .doc extension itself is not.
...the version that was available for the IBM PC? It was one of the original programs available on the PC and was, presumably ported, by that little company that provides DOS, Microsoft. In a nod to the future of DRM, it was also the first program I came across that was "copy protected"; you could make a single copy and then that was it.
Man, that game was just so much freaking fun; I can still see that little bird driving the snake away to this day.
XYZZY forever, baby!
Er, I vaugely remember the runoff command creating .doc files? Or at least .doc files on pdp-10 and pdp-11 systems in the early 1980's.
seeing other
I don't think ".doc" is excluse to MS in any case.
In the thread about it someone posted modified code that can actually compile.. (Even with cygwin!)
http://www.russotto.net/~russotto/ADVENT/
I just compiled and it was flawless, so cheers
I know, you've had a bad week. Here, have a cookie.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Download and install a copy of the original, or read about the history of it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
So ... you're admitting it was your fault the code was lost? :-) :-)
For those who are interested, a C version of the game is part of OpenBSD:t ure
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/src/games/adven
I first played Adventure in 1979 via a TI Silent 700 thermal paper terminal (with built in 300 baud acoustic modem) connected to a PDP-11/83 running Seventh Edition UNIX at Bell Labs. Yep, I'm that old.
WHYYYYYY on EARTH can't I get the flask??
Zork was the reason I got on the ARPANET, back around 1980 or so. I was using Bruce's Northstar BBS that had an adventure game that Bruce had written in Basic, and he told me how to play Zork: first, dial up the NBS TIP, connect to MIT-AI (the command was "@L 134", because the ARPANET had 8 bit host numbers, and AI was 134), and apply for an account to learn Lisp. Once that was granted, I connected to MIT-DM ("@L 70"), and logged in as URANUS, password RINGS, used :CHUNAME to change my user name, and waited until one of the two people playing Zork quit, to take their slot. Later somebody told me the magic words to use to get an account on DM, so I applied for my own account on DM, claiming that I wanted to "Learn MDL for calculus and algebraic applications". The source code to Zork was well hidden. DM ran a weird version of ITS that had some kind of file security or cloaking, it was rumored. I was always looking for the Zork sources, but never found it on DM.
Years later I googled for a unique phrase that was only in the original DM version of Zork, and this URL popped up: http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/
The original MDL source to Zork is really beautiful code that's almost as fun to read as it was to play. I had discovered a bug in the InfoCom version of Zork, which turned out to be in the original sources. When you're fighting the troll who's wielding an Axe, you can give anything to the troll and he will eat it. So I tried "give axe to troll" and he ate his axe, then cowered in the corner! Better yet you can go "give troll to troll" and he will eat himself and disappear, unfortunately not clearing the troll flag that is required to leave the room, so if you try to leave it prints a message saying the troll fends you off with a menacing gesture, and stops you from leaving. Sure enough, in the original sources, there is a troll flag!
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Bad Idea. What if Uwe Boll gets to direct. Oh Noes, the horror.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Along with Adventure, we spent a lot of time on a VAX 11/785 (I believe) playing a game called Hunt. It was multiplayer and each screen showed a top-down section of the maze you were in, like larn, only past that it was like a FPS -- you wandered around, finding ammo, then shooting at other players you saw, using different weapons. A certain amount of ammo let you shoot a bullet, somewhat more a grenade, somewhat more yet an enormous blast that blew up part of the maze, and a whole lot of ammo let you shoot napalm, that ran along corridors without destroying anything (but would pursue people who were running.) I've been trying to find the sourcecode for it for years but haven't even found anyone who has heard of it. Anyone here?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Too bad you had to wait until August of 1977 for the computer to be released.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
I can't post the ASCII graphics because slashdot says "Please use fewer 'junk' characters", but you can search for "Don Woods Commemerative stamp" in the Zork source code here, near the end of the file. Also check out the One Hundred Royal Zorkmids and the portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead!
One Lousy Point
GUE Postage
f.m.l.c.
Donald Woods, Editor
Spelunker Today
100 GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE 100
B30332744D
IN FROBS WE TRUST
DIMWIT FLATHEAD
Series 719GUE
LD Flathead
Treasurer
One Hundred Royal Zorkmids
I had the honor of working with Don Woods on the NeWS window system at Sun Microsystems, back in 1990. He's a great guy, and a kick-ass PostScript programmer!
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Hey, stop picking on Fortran. Sure it's a lame language, but it has an excuse: it's very old now, and didn't know any better at the time, when computer science was young.
PHP is MUCH WORSE than Fortran, yet it was written many years later. The foolish PHP implementors had no excuse to make such a horrible language. They could have learned from the mistakes of the past, but instead they repeated them much worse, and added many original mistakes that nobody had even been stupid enough to make before.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I got tired of running through the same mazes and features that I wrote some sort of script that allowed me to automate play up to the last point where I either got killed or was stuck. It worked most of the time but there was an element of randomness with regards to those damned dwarves randomly throwing their damned axes. Even so, I was finally able to solve the entire puzzle and had a script that walked through it from beginning to end including the twisty little mazes that all look alike. I also recall obtaining the Fortran source code from some where as well.
What fun and what very fond memories.
I'm probably going to get modded as either flamebait or troll for saying this, but I really fail to see the attraction here. As I see it, although the original code might be desirable to keep around as a reference for historical purposes, the state of the art in program design has advanced well beyond what that program has implemented. I'm not talking about the lack of any graphics or fancy features, what I mean is that this old code is almost structureless, difficult to understand, and appears virtually impossible to modify (not that one would ever want to, mind you, it's the principle of the thing). I understand that some of the modern program design methodologies we use today had not yet been discovered when this Crowther wrote this, but other than serving as an example of how _not_ to write a computer program today, the only significant thing that I can see could potentially be gained from this is discovering if in any of the alleged "100% accurate" clones that have since been made, there are deviations in the game from how it played out in the original, and correcting the newer versions to comply. Beyond that... meh.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Umm, I think you missed his joke. Did you get the memo about the TPSREPORT?
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
Any relation to the Adventure game for the Commodore Pet? (Or was it called Haunted House? I can't remember)
I've got a box of cards (two, actually. Two and half, really. You could never get all the cards back into the box). All I need is a card reader and a 360/65 with OS 360 and TSO and I'm set for life.
I've also got a programming card for an 029 and COBOL.
We were the sneaky bastards that used to put random comments and unused character strings into the code to thwart people like you. Then I graduated and became a people like you. And was constantly thwarted by people like me.
OS 360, RSX11D, RSX11M, VMS. RIP.
No games, but I programmed a robot once.
A girl robot?
Har har har.
The guts of FORTRAN is the conversion of formulas written in typical mathematical notation, like x=(y+23)*z, into computer code. Almost every programming language in use today is a descendant of FORTRAN (except, like, shell scripts and original LISP, but I think most LISPs now include evaluation of mathematical formulas).
Choosing a computer language today in most cases is answering the question, "What form of program flow control do you want with your FORTRAN?"
(What would slashdot be without over-generalizations and intentionally inflammatory statements?)
I'll take a C please, can you make it ++ size. Oh, what linker do I want? Err I dunno, surprise me.
which is totally what she said
I had the source for the original FORTRAN ADVENT for ages (running on CP/M) and am pretty sure I have seen it numerous times elsewhere over the years. Also, I had the source for some early (or initial) release of UCSD Pascal. Remember the P-machine?
that's because in '87 people were using cpio not tar :)
I have a somewhat Off Topic Question for people old enough to remember the Colossal Cave game on mainframe. As you know, later PC's came out (not the IBM PC yet, just generic "personal computers" like the TRS-80, Apple ][, Atari etc.) and similar games came out for them.
//e+ era?).
I saw an ad for, and later read a review of, a game that I never actually played. I'm trying to remember the name of the game. The player represented a prisoner being tortured to reveal information, and there was a certain key which would reveal the information when pressed. You were supposed to play the game making sure that you never pressed that One Key. The game was deliberately designed to frustrate the player, and the reviewer said that at one point, the computer would seem to lock up and become unresponsive, so that you might try all sorts of random key combinations, but when you hit the One Key, the computer would spring to life and tell you that you had lost the game.
Anyone remember the name of the game? It was something like "The Prisoner" or something. It was around the era when personal computers first start getting high-res graphics (Apple
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
A while back (uh... 18 years ago) I was involved in a project that was an attempt to revive the Scepter of Goth multiplayer text game. I may be wrong here but I believe that "Scepter" was the first commercial multiplayer fantasy game. A few months ago when I was throwing out old boxes I ran across a 3.5" floppy with all of the Scepter source, and using VMs and an old build of QNX was able to extract it from an image of the floppy. Amazingly a QNX file system check of the floppy passed with no errors after all that time. I then forwarded it to the owner (who had long since lost it) and requested that he GPL the source and release it to the public for the purpose of historical preservation. Got no response though. :( Maybe he's not aware of the fact that there are thousands of free MUDs out there and so this old Scepter code has no real commercial value.
Only those weird System V people. People in BSD land used tar. The two were later unified with pax and the ustar format.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The version I remember playing had both "maze of twisty little passages, all alike," but also the brilliant enhancement-- "twisty little maze of passages, all different," where each description had the words in a different order-- I'm curious as to when that got added, as it would appear to be after this original source...
The FORTRAN src listing to Adventure is also in a back issue of Creative Computing prior to 1982. I don't know which issue and I don't have it anymore since a "friend" of mine borrowed it and promptly lost it.
in FORTRAN.
Well, technically, in WATFOR. And I coded it by hand on punch cards, even though I waited until the 360 operator went on a break to steal the main console and execute my runs for my players.
Selkirk College rules!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When Ken Thompson's 1969 Space Travel's source code is found.
You just got troll'd!
The GP is a dupe.
This site is really slow right now, but at a mere 68 KB, this old gem is worth a look.
d v_crowther_win.zip
Have a look:
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/a
Not my work BTW. Credit goes to the crew on rec.arts.int-fiction.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Is Empire, Wargame of the Century. You can get the original PDP-10 FORTRAN source code from classicempire.com.
so whose going to take on the job of porting 'Adventue' to the iPhone?
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Is this it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_(compute r_game)
I've got sources to Dungeon
Oh PLEASE do share! As a kid I spent inordinate hours on dialup to a DEC-10 running that on my then-in-college brother's account. Would dearly love to run thru it again...
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
This story mildly creeps me out.
I worked down the hall from Willie Crowther when I was at BBN, and I asked him about why he wrote it ("I had some ideas on parsing response analysis I wanted to try"). I think I at least used to have a copy of the Fortran source code salted away on my account somewhere, though I'd probably have a problem laying my hands on it now. I just wasn't aware that anyone was looking for it.
Ah, WATFOR and WATFIV. That brings back memories of punch cards and 24 hour turn around times at the end of the quarter when the projects were due.
One of my favorite memories of computer gaming at the time was Hammurabi, run on a Teletype that was connected via acoustical modem to a computer over two hundred miles away. I was able to get the population from about 100 people to over five billion before I made a mistake and failed to enter the right number of zeros for one of the parameters. Everybody died the next turn or so.
If I recall, other versions of Fortran were also text deficient. I seem to recall having a four character limit for H (Hollerith) type variables.
Of course it has been a few decades since I've played with Fortran.
I still have that issue, the one with the dragon on the cover art? It's the one issue I kept when I gave away all my CC magazines.
It didn't have the FORTRAN code to Adventure but did have articles such as 'How to fit a bit program into a small machine' describing Zork and ZIL (Zork Interpretive Language), a BASIC text adventure or two, and a few others.
Heh, I remember having SLIRP installed on my shell account, disguised as "mail" (we weren't allowed to run slip/ppp). I'm sure the admins were wondering why I spent hours and hours running mail.
The Da Vinci source code?
Seriously, this is a cool find (if a couple of years old). I first played Adventure in 1981, on a Xerox Sigma 7 running CP-V, in a FORTRAN implementation that had been customized a bit by the locals. (For instance, in the original game you could say "XYZZY" in the well house [or wherever] and bypass the locked grate; our version had that hole plugged.)
Later, around 1983-4, we had a Honeywell CP-6 system with an updated Adventure written in PL-6 (a pretty neat system language with customizable data structures and bit-level addressing). Somewhere, I may still have the PL-6 source for that one on 5.25" floppies. That system also included the pre-Zork Dungeon game; "the Tomb of the Implementers" and "Feel free" soon became catch-phrases around the office.
From glancing over the code, I can tell it's been a long time since I even thought seriously about writing FORTRAN (my first real language). I don't miss FORMAT statements, but I do miss the relative simplicity of most of the syntax (particularly when faced with a punctuation nightmare like LISP). In early FORTRAN, when a statement ended, it was over. You didn't have to count levels of punctuation or IF/DO/WHILE nesting across thousands of lines of code.
You only had to follow hundreds of GOTO statements....
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
The DOC extension has been around for as long as I can remember (mid-late '80s, which is about when I started using computers). It used to be an extension used interchangeably with .txt, particularly for documentation files for downloaded software.
It was much more recently that Microsoft decided to use .doc as its default MS Word extension. I don't know how much basis it has, but my conspiracy theory at the time was that they simply did it because it would mean that MS Word would automatically become the default editor for a lot of pre-existing documents and gain more visibility for PC users, even though they were really only text files.
I still wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out that this was actually the case. It certainly annoyed me enough at the time that it was more difficult to figure out if a .doc file was really a text file without actually opening it, and that it was more complicated to open .doc files without the slow and bloated MS Word jumping in and always wanting to be the application to edit them.
Best.Game.Ever. Nuff Said.
Having mucked around in the maze of smoke and mirrors that is TeX, I must challenge that title.
Knuth is obviously a fantastic theorist, and I do appreciate the contributions he's made to the field.
However, his creation, TeX, isn't exactly a shining beacon of how to write a program/standard. Sure, it's great in concept, but more often than not, I find myself cursing the heavens for its unpredictability and cryptic debugging output when something goes wrong.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I can identify with that. Only six 1933 (British pennies) were minted, they were proof coins and not meant for circulation. Somehow they did get into circulation and as a child I got one in my change. I was trying to get a penny for each year of the twentieth century but spent them when I found that there were several years that no pennies were minted. A few days later i read the rest of the article and found out that the last 1933 penny found had fetched 30,000 pounds at auction at a time when a upmarket home was 3,000. My father said that the coin was probably a fake made by scratching off half of the 8 of a 1938 penny but I will never know for sure.
"14+ years and have never seen the need for a goto"
You've obviously never written any heavily nested constructs. Using a goto to jump out of 3 or more levels of nesting is a damn sight neater and easier to follow than using a condition flag test in each loop block or exceptions. They also have other uses such as a loop restart - goto avoids having to have a wrapping loop with a test condition flag.
Suffice to say goto has its place so long as its used correctly. I'm afraid Dijkstra was a bit of a zealot who was more interested in being recognised for his genius rather than thinking the issue through.
I seriously doubt that the code was really "lost". My gosh - it used to be on *every* Unix system delivered!
I'm pretty sure I have on tape somewhere the original Fortran code - I remember trying to compile it on the Apple II - we did compile it on the MicroVAX's both Ultra and VMS. There were also flavors where people had used it as an exercise in converting to RatFOR. Anyway - I think "re-discovered" would be more appropriate - not lost and found.
Regards,
Jon
I've sent stdio for my pdp emulator to a java terminal.. the username and password are both "adventure" with no quotes, all lower case, so you guys can play it online!!
address is http://adventure.on.nimp.org/
I might try to fanagle a way for users to save and resume games... not sure.
Check it out though!
Here's the Coral Cache link so we can save the poor guy's server from Slashdotting:
D VENT/
http://www.russotto.net.nyud.net:8080/~russotto/A
I worked with some of Willie's assembly language code when working on Pluribus software back in the late '70s. He'd moved on to PARC or Stanford or something, and left behind some intricate 16-bit assembly code that took care of part of the Arpanet protocols. As a colleague said, "Willie's code is hard to read because he'd optimize as he wrote."
If it didn't have the Fortran source code, you're thinking of the wrong issue.
One year Creative Computing went all-out with their April Fool's issue. (I think this was around 1979-1981.) The issue had a normal cover and a bunch of normal articles on one side, if you flipped the magazine over and upside-down, there was a gag cover and the other half was full of gag articles and gag advertisements. One of them showed a circuit board on an anvil, with an elf holding a chisel to it and about to pound it with a big mallet. And it said "We still make our Apple sound cards the old fashioned way. One at a time, by hand."
This was back in the day when computer magazines would still print entire program listings for people to type into their home computer by hand, most often in BASIC. Making fun of this, the April Fool's issue said they were including the full listing of the original Crowther & Woods Adventure game. The joke was after reading that intro, it was actually THERE, photo-reduced enough that it would fit onto a few pages of the magazine. The text was small, but still legible. Of course it was not only far more than any sane person would read and retype by hand, but it was all in Fortran, which no personal computer of the era had a compiler for. (Compilers of any kind were pretty rare in those days, most PCs running either interpreted BASIC or assembly language - though there was a Pascal for the Apple ][+).
I hope I still have my tattered copy of that issue in the boxes full of stuff in my garage. But surely there must be a number of geeks that have saved that memorable, hilarious issue - in my view, the high point of the magazine's entire run.
-- Dr. Cat
"You had ones? We had to use the letter L!"