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JudyL_MD wrote: I had a whole stack of graph paper with the floor layouts
Me too.
I feel a bit younger after reading all these posts; I didn't see Adventure until the BBC micro port.
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I played it on an IBM 360 mainframe.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I knew immediately.... 
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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This is one of the standard comments Matthew makes when he's giving me tips on some of the more...dusty...areas of the CodeProject codebase.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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web2
Stop shaking Chris; it couldn't have been that bad.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Pure Evil.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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My big "shock" along the same lines I actually had 30 years ago, around 1992-93.
I was teaching telecommunication systems; going to look at various signaling alternatives such as tone signaling, interrupt signaling, digital out-of-band signaling (in ISDN). To open with something familiar, I started with the tick-tick-tick of the rotary dial phone. The students returned a blank stare. Rotary dial, what's that? In two student groups, a total of between 55 and 60 students, two of them had seen such a phone, plus one claiming that an old aunt actually had one of those museum devices. A few other students told that they had seen such things in old movies, but never in real life.
So my attempt to start out at 'something familiar' failed completely. Today it is not surprising that rotary dial phones are unfamiliar, but this was thirty years ago!
Then: I frequently see young people refer to concepts like 'Big Brother' and '1984', sometimes obviously out of context. Whether out of or in context, if I ask a little closer, it turns out that the only thing they know about the novel is the title, and that the state in called 'Big Brother'. They haven't even opened the title page of the book.
There was a reference not many days ago, here in the lounge, to 'I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.' I guess that a fair share of the readers know this as 'a way of speech', but have never seen the movie.
I could list a dozen similar ones, but half of them are culture specific. Still, they are of the same nature: Ways of speech, and idiomatic references where the older generation knows the historical background, the younger do not but keep using it as ways of speech.
I suspect that a lot of the ways of speech of my generation is the same way: To me/us, they are just 'standard expressions'. If I could ask my great grandparents, if they had been alive, they might associate something very specific with it, maybe from a person we have hardly heard of, or to some event far back in history. So I am not really demanding/expecting younger people to understand the background for expressions such as twisting little passages all alike, I'm afraid I can't do that, jumping after Wirkola and the Soup Council. It is nevertheless fun to meet youth who are willing to learn the background. If they ask, they are fascinated by the answers.
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Your Big Brother reference reminded me of something from my first year of university, that being 1971-1972. I was a member of the university radio station. One of the staff bought a new date stamp and discovered, somewhat prophetically or ironically, that the highest date it could produce was December 31, 1983.
He took a sheet of paper, stamped it all over with that date, leaving a blank area in the middle. In that space he printed "You know what tomorrow is...", then he posted the result on the bulletin board in the station.
Many of us looked it over, smiled and nodded, having got the reference right away. However, those of us who did get it were astounded by the number of people who stared at it, then said, "I don't get it". Even after pointing out to them that the next day would be January 1st, 1984, their typical answer would be "So?".
For most of us, 1984 had been required reading in a high school literature class. It kind of brought home that too many people had never cracked the book, and never learned about doublespeak.
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Played it on a PDP-10 in 1977 or 1978.
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I played it on my CPM System around that time. A friend of mine played it as well.
He started a job at Link-a-Bit (later Qualcomm) as the new guy they showed it to him at lunch on the PDP-10, he progressed so far into the game they ask him how he went so far. he told them he played it on a friend's home computer, they thought it was impossible, that it could only be run on a Main Frame.
Now you can run it on a phone.
PROGRESS and there are some that believe it is all Alien Technology.
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"Adventure." Floppy disk. From MS actually. A dragon on the packaging.
Pencil and paper to chart the maze. Like "mind" VR.
(Before that there was Star Trek; on the engineering computers; by modem; on thermal paper)
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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That was the first computer game I ever played, it was on my dad's TRaSh-80 Model I. I loved it! Now I'm playing the modern graphical version created by Roberta Williams of Sierra Online fame (King's Quest series, Space Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.)
You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all alike.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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Not only did I know (and play) ADVENTURE, but I still have a BASIC listing of the code for it.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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There was another unlock word as well, but I cant remember what it actually did now. The word was "PLUGH". Does this ring a bell with anyone
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I got to play this in 1976 when I spent the day at work with my uncle and never got to play it again. The next year when my Dad got a TRS-80, I tried (and failed miserably) to write my own version since I didn't have access to a mainframe to play it on.
Never trust a quote you see on the internet. - Ab Lincoln, 1492
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I had so much fun with these games.
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I spent way too much time playing this on a PDP-10 in the 70s. The original Fortran code was an engine. The first time it was run after being linked, it read the contents of a map file (map, objects, actions, etc) into memory and encrypted it. Then it exited leaving the image in memory. You then typed save to create an executable with the map loaded. It would have been easy to change the map but we never did. There were two mazes. In one every room's description was "You are in a maze of twisty passages all alike". In the other maze, every room's description was "You are in a maze of twisty passages all different". You might go North from one room, but to return you might need to go East or West. To map the mazes you had to leave objects in each room so you could tell them apart. Only the first 5 characters of a word were checked because 5 7-bit Ascii characters fit in in a 36-bit word. I never got into Zork but we did have another adventure game called Sewer that was written as a TECO macro. XYZZY, PLUGH, and other words from Adventure along with various characters from "The Lord of the Ring" were among the known likely passwords the internet worm tried.
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Back in the late 1970's, the company I worked for hired a software programmer from Data General. He brought with him a tape that had the source code to Adventure on it. We got local company to extract the code and put in on an 8" floppy. We had just purchased Microsoft's Fortran compiler were able get Adventure up and running on our own version of a PC. Productivity took a nose dive for the next month or so. Byte magazine published the complete source code in a mouse point font.
To win you had to fight the dragon with your bare hands If you tried any weapon you were killed. You had to answer yes to the question "Do you really want to kill the dragon with your bare hands?"
Another game I remember spending hours making maps of 20 levels of 10x10 grids was OrbQuest.
modified 31-Oct-23 9:15am.
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When I was at Uni a friend had worked on the source for it and realised that the game was entirely deterministic and repeatable as long as you typed the exact same sequence of keystrokes. Since the version we had had no way to save a game and resume later, he wrote a simple C program which read a file to feed in to the program, and also added all the keys you typed to the end of the file, thus we could replay the game to wherever we had got to last time.
And a hollow voice still says "Plugh!".
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Colossal Cave Adventure, Star Trek, Lunar Lander, even the original Oregon Trail. 1970-75-ish. All clackity clacking on an ASR-33 teletype. I remember it well. When we upgraded to a "portable" thermal print terminal in 1975, we lost all the clackity-ness for a quieter "Phhhffft, phhhffft".
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Yep, really enjoyed playing it!
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I first entered the Cave as a Freshman EE in 1975 on a 360 mainframe running TSO.
IMHO,
"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." is to computing as
"Go ahead, make my day." is to movies.
Perry
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Oh yes.. spent hours in the caves via a PDP-11/34 thanks to DECUS
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