ESR Announces The Open Sourcing Of The World's First Text Adventure (ibiblio.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Open source guru Eric S. Raymond added something special to his GitHub page: an open source version of the world's first text adventure. "Colossal Cave Adventure" was first written in 1977, and Raymond remembers it as "the origin of many things; the text adventure game, the dungeon-crawling D&D (computer) game, the MOO, the roguelike genre. Computer gaming as we know it would not exist without ADVENT (as it was known in its original PDP-10 incarnation...because PDP-10 filenames were limited to six characters of uppercase)...

"Though there's a C port of the original 1977 game in the BSD game package, and the original FORTRAN sources could be found if you knew where to dig, Crowther & Woods's final version -- Adventure 2.5 from 1995 -- has never been packaged for modern systems and distributed under an open-source license. Until now, that is. With the approval of its authors, I bring you Open Adventure."
Calling it one of the great artifacts of hacker history, ESR writes about "what it means to be respectful of an important historical artifact when it happens to be software," ultimately concluding version control lets you preserve the original and continue improving it "as a living and functional artifact. We respect our history and the hackers of the past best by carrying on their work and their playfulness."

"Despite all the energy Crowther and Woods had to spend fighting ancient constraints, ADVENT was a tremendous imaginative leap; there had been nothing like it before, and no text adventure that followed it would be innovative to quite the same degree."

Comments

The best computer game ever

[coastwalker]

I remember playing this with a group of friends on a teletypewriter overnight in the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology Cardiff in 1981. We played the whole thing through from start to end in one session. I did the typing because I could touch type. I think we finished at about 5am. No computer game has really interested me since. Once you have played ADVENT you have played them all. I still have the printout somewhere, it weighs about five pounds.

Re:The best computer game ever

[coastwalker]

It was a great era for computing and anyone who used it knew it was going places, so yes it was a special time. You could already see where it was going to go from things like Douglas Adams 'Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy' and its talking book. And so it has come to pass, the mobile phone gives everybody on the planet access to all knowledge. Sadly a lot of them only use it to get sports scores and slag each other off on social media, people are funny like that. But it is still true that all of the amazing possibilities of computing are available for peanuts to most people now, so the promise was largely realised. Whilst you might not feel that computing itself is quite as exciting today as it was before we had today's hardware you can still get a lot more out of it.

If you really want to get a buzz out of technology these days then you should probably be working in genetics or personalized medicine which to repeat an old joke "could be a cure for cancer". More importantly we can already see that gene therapy, the microbiome and genetically modified plants are going to be as important to humanity in thirty years as computing has become. All these worlds are there ready, waiting to be explored.

Re:The best computer game ever

[TheRaven64]

I enjoyed the Zork series when I was a child and my father said I should play this game and see the original. We found an old IBM 8080 machine in the back of a store room along with the OS and ADVENT on a pair of 8" floppy disks and played it on the terminal (the entire machine was a big blue box with the backplane and various circuit boards - we had to pull a couple apart to get the full set of working ones - another big blue box containing two 8" floppy disk drives, and a blue [you might spot a theme here. Big Blue was really into branding] terminal). The entire machine was bigger than I was back then.

A few years later I bought a Psion Series 3 (256KB of RAM, also used for persistent storage) and a 128KB flash SSD (a single cell, so you could write to it at arbitrary granularity, but erasing didn't free space and you had to back everything up, erase it, and restore the things you wanted). I bought Infozip (Infocom interpreter) and The Lost Treasures of Infocom to play on it. Most of the games fitted happily on the 128KB flash drive, with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a 150KB monster) being the one exception.

Infozip came with a port of ADVENT. I think that was the first time I'd really appreciated the rate of technological advance. The old IBM monster was less powerful than a machine that I carried around in my jacket pocket.

Doesn't compile?

[Danj2k]

I downloaded this to my Linux box and tried to run "make", but it complained about needing to be in C99 mode. Is this release only compatible with the original hardware and OS it was written on or something? I thought from the README it was supposed to be a port that works on modern computers/OSes?

Gee, I wonder...

[tlambert]

Who wrote the C version while converting the game from 32 bit to 24 bit Hollerith code on a Harris H-800 at Weber State University n the 1980's.

P.S.: It was Open Source when I did that; it had been declared public domain.

P.P.S.: Public domain is better than a freaking license.