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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the xyzzy dept.

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."

19 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. The best computer game ever by coastwalker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
    1. Re:The best computer game ever by thegreatbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There's no +1 Awesome mod, and my mod points expired, so I'll just leave this comment instead :D Hearing about stuff like this makes me feel as though I was born a couple decades too late to enjoy computing to its fullest, but reading other folks tales from the earlier days of computing brings me no shortage of enjoyment, so it'll have to do.

      --
      There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
    2. Re:The best computer game ever by coastwalker · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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      Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
    3. Re:The best computer game ever by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. Re:The best computer game ever by Pikoro · · Score: 4, Funny

      All these worlds are there ready, waiting to be explored.

      Except for Europa. Fuck those guys :)

      --
      "Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
    5. Re:The best computer game ever by Layzej · · Score: 3, Informative

      Here's the original code and data for anyone interested:

      http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/crowther/advdat.77-03-31

      http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/crowther/advf4.77-03-31

  2. The worst source code ever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The real game is being able to navigate in the source code. The dungeon stuff is just a bonus side effect.

  3. PLATO by tricorn · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not going to say that ADVENT didn't inspire a lot of things, and I played it in several variants (including a version that was written on PLATO, called "adventl"), but there were certainly dungeon games written before ADVENT, specifically "dnd" on PLATO was written in 1974. Oubliette was released in late 1977 (so was unlikely to have been predicated on ADVENT) and Avatar was already being written by then as well, the first version of Moria was written in 1975 ...

    1. Re:PLATO by tal_mud · · Score: 3, Informative

      Memories! I played dnd, Oubliette and Moria in 1977 on Plato. It was an amazing system for its time. MMORPG (trek) and touch panels way back in '77

      There even exists a PLATO emulation for those who really miss it: https://cyber1.org/

  4. Doesn't compile? by Danj2k · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Doesn't compile? by gnasher719 · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is by Eric Raymond. C99 _is_ modern. Not to you, not to me, but to some people.

    2. Re:Doesn't compile? by sTERNKERN · · Score: 5, Informative

      With GCC4.7 and with CFLAGS=-std=c99 added to the beginning of the Makefile it compiled for me just fine.

  5. Yet another version... by thogard · · Score: 5, Informative

    The FORTRAN source can be found here:
    http://rickadams.org/adventure...

  6. Gee, I wonder... by tlambert · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Gee, I wonder... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Public domain is better than a freaking license

      No it isn't. In some countries, public domain as a concept doesn't exist. In some others, public domain does exist, but things can't be explicitly assigned to the public domain and only end up there once copyright expires. In any of these jurisdictions, in the absence of a license the default remains that you have no rights. Additionally, if you simply place something in the public domain without a disclaimer of warranty, then you may find yourself liable for any of bugs in the code.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  7. GitLab & GitHub by mpilsbury · · Score: 4, Informative

    The summary says that ESR put the repo on GitGub. It's actually on GitLab.

    It's nice to see not everyone slavishly uses GitHub all of the time.

  8. Poetry vs Television by aberglas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That is the difference between ADVENT and modern games.

    Ancient technology. But the Hall of Mists that sways back and forward as if alive is far more evocative than anything a bazillion flop GPU can produce.

  9. Plugh! by EricTDuckman1414 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Plugh!

  10. Re:You are likely to be eaten... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let me guess: you pirated the games. This kind of logic was an early copy protection mechanism. When you bought them, you got a little pamphlet with hints and clues for the hardest puzzles.

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