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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."
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...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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
The 70's era computers weren't so bad. You had a command line interface and generally human understandable commands.
A few of the classics are available as free downloads. They became more sophisticated over time. Have a look at Zork for an example of one of the popular ones.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. If you didn't pick up the mail that is casually mentioned in the first few moments of the game, you are essentially screwed once you get on the Vogon ship. If you didn't by the extra "hint" books some of these things where almost impossible.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Crowther's original was a game, and you can play it for yourself. Matthew Russoto tweaked the recovered source code so that it will compile under g77.
... and David Kinder published a Windows executable.
d v_crowther_win.zip
e s/default/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html
0 009.html
http://www.russotto.net/~russotto/ADVENT/
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/a
That file will move eventually... you will probably be able to find it from here:
http://www.wurb.com/if/person/2
There are also photos of the inside of the real Colossal Cave, including photos of what's left of the famous brick building (just a foundation, sadly) the famous rock with a Y2 on it, and even a rusty axe head and an iron rod.
http://brain.lis.uiuc.edu:2323/opencms/export/sit
or
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/00
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
Crowther also had adult playtesters, including his sister (who asked for a cheat code, leading to the invention of "XYZZY") and his colleagues at BBN. One of the vocabulary words it recognizes is "f*ck". Woods added the scoring and reincarnation system, a timer, and the game's conclusion. But Crowther's version had treasures, simple puzzles, basic combat, and magic (the crystal bridge, teleportation). Crowther's version was definitely a game. It's all in the Digital Humanities Quarterly article.
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
The text of some issues of Creative Computing magazine: http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/index/
Not sure if they have the issue you mention though.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
So the little snippet you posted goes to label 3 if the current character (selected by J for the integer and K for the character within the integer) is a space, and to 2 if no space has been found yet, and continues without branching if a space has been found but the current character is not a space.
If A were, more sensibly, a character array, the above would be written as
IF(A(J:J).EQ.' ')GOTO 3
IF(S.EQ.0) GOTO 2
which is no problem to read at all, despite the gotos.
In a way, it wasn't a dead end. The computed goto is the ancestor of the switch construct of languages like C. The difference is that with a switch the consequents are associated with the trigger values, whereas the computed goto keeps all the trigger values grouped together.
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!