Crowther's Original Adventure Source Code Found

drxenos writes "I don't know how many of you are fans of old-school text adventures (interactive fiction), but Will Crowther's original Fortran source code has been located in a backup of Don Woods's old student account. For fans like me, this is like finding the Holy Grail."

rogue for me

[fifedrum]

yeah, can't say I'm anything other than a rogue, nethack, moria, umoria fan. the modern games with their "animation" and "pictures" and "sound" are just too easy.

Holy Grail

[biocute]

I digged out my Transformers toys when the movie was out, but playing with them doesn't give me the same thrill as they did 20 years ago.

This, is probably the same.

This is very important

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe a lot of today's nerds are too young to remember, but ADVENT was one of the most important computer games ever written. Its influence is still with us today, from mere hacker jargon to standard features of many modern games. Scoff if you want, but this discovery has historical significance. There has been a great deal of speculation and debate over the years about Crowther's and Woods's relative contributions to the game, and Crowther's source code puts numerous questions to rest. If the history of computers, and particularly of computer games, is at all a subject worthy of study, then this source code has to be considered a major find.

Re:he was meant to say

[Ant P.]

You know, I'd rather have other people see me as a nerd than as someone gratuitously illiterate and idiotic.

Re:This sounds familiar

[Targon]

In an era where there were no computer graphics at all, text was the only thing available. And it was a lot of fun as well.

The original Zork games, as well as the rest of the Infocom games were inspired by Adventure to a large degree. It should be noted that because they were text based, some things that would be considered obvious were not necessarily obvious in those days, which added to the puzzle solving aspect of the game.

These days, everything is made almost too obvious, because too many potential customers don't like a challenge(note that many games can be beaten straight out of the box in under 24 hours of playing). Back in those days, a game could take weeks of playing to figure out what to do, beating your head against a problem for several days before a solution would present itself wasn't uncommon.

Then again, it seems that too many people never bother to pick up a book when movies are available, and never realize how horribly the film makers have screwed up a great story, so it's no wonder some people would never understand why text adventures were fun.

Re:I am hoping

[drxenos]

I didn't wish to hammer the poor guy's site. The lazy will always click the link. Only those truly interested would take the time to look for it. The man is doing people a favorite, and now your going to punish him by slashdotting his site.

Re:A good example of how coding has progressed

[fm6]

Memory is not the issue here. Turbo Pascal was designed to run in a single 64K 8086 segment, and Pascal is the quintessential block-structured language. The real problem is that the designers of FORTRAN were totally ignorant of the principles of language design. They could hardly be otherwise: FORTRAN was the very first high-level language.

But here's a sobering thought: Dijkstra launched his attack on the goto statement [acm.org] in 1968. Every programmer who's grown up with block structured languages would take it as a given that Dijkstra was right. But at the time, the concept was extremely controversial, and there was a lot of resistance — as evidenced by the fact that Crowther and Wood were still using computed gotos in 1976!

Stop picking on Fortran, and stop using PHP!

[SimHacker]

Hey, stop picking on Fortran. Sure it's a lame language, but it has an excuse: it's very old now, and didn't know any better at the time, when computer science was young.

PHP is MUCH WORSE than Fortran, yet it was written many years later. The foolish PHP implementors had no excuse to make such a horrible language. They could have learned from the mistakes of the past, but instead they repeated them much worse, and added many original mistakes that nobody had even been stupid enough to make before.

-Don

Re:This sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you want to play it again, online, for free, with graphics, it's here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml [bbc.co.uk]

Re:Is it just me...?

[drxenos]

I think you are looking at it from the wrong perspective. Do not look at its merits as a program, especially when compared to modern day games. Imagine you were a coin collector, and happened across an old coin thought to not even exist anymore. Or a comic collector finding a MINT copy of Detective #27 (there are no known mint copies). That is what it is like for me as a collector. Granted it does not have the monetary value of my examples, but money is not the point. It the historical value, and nostalgia for me.

Re:Why it was special...

[rk]

Things were so different even just 20 or so years ago. In 1985, I hacked my college's VAX 11/750 to give me all privs. The system manager found me out, and just reset the privs, locked my account for a week, and asked how I did it so he could fix the problem. Wound up doing a lot of work for him until he left for greener pastures. It formally never happened, even though it could certainly have been elevated up the disciplinary chain.

If I did that today, no doubt I would've been kicked out of school, arrested, and depending on what research was being done on the box, been subjected to extraordinary rendition to flush out my Al Qaeda cell. :-/

Re:The Fortran gods shall smite thee

[Frumious Wombat]

How disappointing; you wrote that in modern Fortran. They were true gods in the day when they could smiteth without 'else' statements, and using computed gotos, arithmatic ifs, and the "EQUIVALENCE" statement.