From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: akosela at andykosela.com (Andy Kosela) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2020 23:06:13 +0200 Subject: [COFF] =?utf-8?q?Fwd=3A_This_Woman_Inspired_One_of_the_First_Hit?= =?utf-8?q?_Video_Games_by_Mapping_the_World=E2=80=99s_Longest_Cave?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 7/15/20, Clem Cole 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