[COFF] Fwd: This Woman Inspired One of the First Hit Video Games by Mapping the World’s Longest Cave

[clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

If you'll old enough to remember 'ADVENT' and been around the geeks when it
was a craze on the ARPA-net in the late 70s. You might find this article
which was in my feed last night:
https://onezero.medium.com/the-woman-who-inspired-one-of-the-first-hit-video-games-by-mapping-the-worlds-longest-cave-ef572ccde6d2
fun.

For those that did not, it was the world's first adventure game (no
graphics, just solving a series of puzzles while wandering through a
cave).   It was originally written in Fortran-IV for the PDP-10/20 with a
small assembler assist to handle RAD50 for the input.  [FYI: MIT'S Haystack
observatory is about 2 miles as the crow flies from my house on the top
of hill next over, in the town next to mine, Westford.  Groton, MA is the
town after that].

This article is an interesting read (about 20 mins) with stuff I
never knew.  I knew a divorced Will Crowthers worked at BBN and wrote the
game Adventure for his daughters to play when they visited him.  I also
knew that he had been a caver and that the cave in the game was modeled
after Kentucky's Mammoth Caves.  I did not know until a few years ago,
[from a friend of my wife's, Madeliene Needles] that at some time they were
living in Groton (because Crothers' ex-wife was working at Haystack with
Madeliene for a while).  As this article tells the story, it was Patricia
Crowthers who actually did the mapping work.

FWIW: As a fun factoid, today, the Stanford version is one of the tests
used by the old DEC and now the Intel Fortran-2018 compiler to verify that
the compiler can still compile fixed format FORTRAN-IV and ensure the
resulting program still works.  And of course, 'packrat Clem;' my own
'advent' map is in my filing cabinet in the basement.  Written on the back
of '132 column green bar' computer paper of course.

Clem

For the folks that are interested, more good stuff including a number of
versions of the code can be found at: https://rickadams.org/adventure/
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