I started working on this article in 2000, thinking I'd be able to
slap something together for the 25th anniversary of Colossal Cave
Adventure. But writing it has turned out to be an addictive Babelfish
puzzle.  The preliminary research I did turned into the IF
Bibliography, which also led to a glossary for the IF Theorybook.  The
book is in cryonic sleep at the moment but the glossary thrives at the
IF WIki.

Reading the post Andrew Plotkin published several years ago about all
the cave research he did in preparation for writing Hunter, in
Darkness made me start daydreaming about an actual visit to the real
Colossal Cave was a possibility, and watching a library copy of
Raiders of the Lost Ark made me fantasize about finding Crowther's
original source code.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Adventure, and I think the
article was worth the wait.

The full text (with about 40 photos from in and around the real
Colossal Cave) is available online. See the link after the abstract.

Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original
"Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 1.1 (2007)

Abstract
Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic
text computer game "Colossal Cave Adventure", academic and popular
references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies. "Adventure" was
the first in a series of text-based games ("interactive fiction") that
emphasize exploring, puzzles, and story, typically in a fantasy
setting; these games had a significant cultural impact in the late
1970s and a significant commercial presence in the early 1980s. Will
Crowther based his program on a real cave in Kentucky; Don Woods
expanded this version significantly. The expanded work has been
examined as an occasion for narrative encounters (Buckles 1985) and as
an aesthetic masterpiece of logic and utility (Knuth 1998); however,
previous attempts to assess the significance of "Adventure" remain
incomplete without access to Crowther's original source code and
Crowther's original source cave. Accordingly, this paper analyzes
previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods's
student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real
Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005. In addition, new interviews with
Crowther, Woods, and their associates (particularly members of
Crowther's family) provide new insights on the precise nature of
Woods's significant contributions. Real locations in the cave and
several artifacts (such as an iron rod and an axe head) correspond to
their representation in Crowther's version; however, by May of 1977,
Woods had expanded the game to include numerous locations that he
invented, along with significant technical innovations (such as
scorekeeping and a player inventory). Sources that incorrectly date
Crowther's original to 1972 or 1974, or that identify it as a
cartographic data file with no game or fantasy elements, are sourced
thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the
game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in
early 1976. The original game employed magic, humor, simple combat,
and basic puzzles, all of which Woods greatly expanded. While Crowther
remained largely faithful to the geography of the real cave, his
original did introduce subtle changes to the environment in order to
improve the gameplay.

Will Crowther's original FORTRAN source code
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/crowther/

Full Article
http://brain.lis.uiuc.edu:2323/opencms/export/sites/default/dhq/vol/0...

The above URL is a test site, but one of the journal editors has
posted this URL to his blog, so I'm considering the article officially
published now.

I imagine the article will eventually occur on the journal's main
site, at

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html

dennis.j...@gmail.com ha scritto:

O_O

The original Adventure 0 ?????

Unbelievable !!! a true Relic of the history of gaming !

I'm without words... Now rummaging this ancient but very significant
piece of code, it's remarkable that is very tiny compared to Woods's
350, 13k code and 19k data.

I can suggest you to upload them in their proper place, that is, the
if-archive ?

My congrats, mr. Jerz !!
Dott. Piergiorgio.

HOLY MOLY.  This is amazing work.  I especially love the photographs
illustrating all the famous places in Adventure:  the cobble crawl,
the window on the pit, the hall of mists, the maze of twisty passages
all alike.  (You got to cave with Roger Brucker, too -- I hope you
know how fortunate you are.)  And you found the original Will Crowther
FORTRAN source code, long thought to be lost forever, and analyzed it.
Congratulations on a historical achievement and a great article!

- David Librik
lib...@panix.com

It is clear on a single reading that this is the most important single
paper ever written on the history of interactive fiction.

Wow, this is exceptionally cool. Now we just need to find a way to get the
Crowther version running again ...

David

yes, just out of curiosity, because I don't know anything about Fortran, is
it possible to compile those sources with for example g77 (gnu fortran), do
we have to edit / adapt / modify the source before ?

Before using a standard Fortran compiler there would definitely need to be
modification: it was written in Fortran-IV (probably), which is much older
than the standard Fortran-77 that g77 understands. Given what the known
original Crowther/Woods 350 point code looks like, it also has dependencies
on the PDP-10 architecture (36 bit words).

Not impossible to fix, but not trivial, either.

David

This is jaw-droppingly fantastic. Congratulations Dennis.

It'll need some changing, I think, but basically it ought to be
possible, yes.  I spotted an .XOR., which isn't standard, I think, and
the continuations in:

        COMMON RTEXT,LLINE
        DIMENSION IOBJ(300),ICHAIN(100),IPLACE(100)
        1 ,IFIXED(100),COND(300),PROP(100),ABB(300),LLINE(1000,22)
        2 ,LTEXT(300),STEXT(300),KEY(300),DEFAULT(300),TRAVEL(1000)
        3 ,TK(25),KTAB(1000),ATAB(1000),BTEXT(200),DSEEN(10)

Aren't right.  It should be

      COMMON RTEXT,LLINE
      DIMENSION IOBJ(300),ICHAIN(100),IPLACE(100)
     1     ,IFIXED(100),COND(300),PROP(100),ABB(300),LLINE(1000,22)
     2     ,LTEXT(300),STEXT(300),KEY(300),DEFAULT(300),TRAVEL(1000)
     3     ,TK(25),KTAB(1000),ATAB(1000),BTEXT(200),DSEEN(10)

Eric Forgeot ha scritto:

I suggest of using Bob Supnik's SIMH emulator, whose is an excellent
emulator of the PDP-10 (and other machines...) Also, there's floating on
the net the binaries of the OS for the -10

Another resource can be Al Kossow's archive of manuals of 50s to 70s
machines, surely there is the full documentation on the PDP-10 Fortran IV

I think that there's enough resources for understanding, compiling, and
running Adventure 0 ;)

Best regards from Italy,
Dott. Piergiorgio.

I know next to nothing about Fortran, but could it be Fortran 66 instead
of IV? I believe g77 is able to compile Fortran 66 code.

If anyone is considering porting this, comp.lang.fortran looks like it has
an active and helpful community.

On Aug 11, 3:33 pm, Stephen Gilbert <stgilb...@gmail.com> wrote:

That the file names end with 'f4' is probably a clue.  The code I've
looked
at isn't particularly complicated and there isn't that much of it; I
don't
think it would be either difficult or tedious to port it.

  Chuck