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

[akosela at andykosela.com (Andy Kosela)]

On 7/15/20, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 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/

There is also an excellent Interactive Fiction documentary created by
Jason Scott called "Get Lamp" where they also talk about the history
of Adventure.

  https://youtu.be/o15itQ_EhRo

--Andy