X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?a=blobdiff_plain;f=history.adoc;h=8a0f8bf4b8b694bae802aaba3900d3f88dcb64f0;hb=57f2dfb28f3fa606ec8acd88bb1d92335be94fb1;hp=d01910b2490f97e473112fda481edd5060558795;hpb=9dca58699f821a1e4eaa358a556bf6b27fe382b9;p=open-adventure.git

diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc
index d01910b..8a0f8bf 100644
--- a/history.adoc
+++ b/history.adoc
@@ -1,9 +1,9 @@
 = A brief history of Colossal Cave Adventure =
 by Eric S. Raymond
 
-Adventure is the fons et origo of all later dungeon-crawling games,
-the grandaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed artifacts
-of hacker folklore.
+Adventure is the fons et origo of all later dungeon-crawling computer
+games, the grandaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed
+artifacts of hacker folklore.
 
 The very first version was released by Crowther in 1976, in FORTRAN on
 the PDP-10 at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. (Crowther was at the time
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ Kentucky, including fewer of the D&D-like elements now associated with
 the game.
 
 Adventure as we now know it, the ancestor of all later versions, was
-was released on a PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab by Don Woods in 1977
+released on a PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab by Don Woods in 1977
 (some sources, apparently erroneously, say 1976). That version is
 sometimes known as 350-point Adventure.
 
@@ -69,6 +69,7 @@ he replied on 15 May giving both permission and encouragement.
 Here is what Don said about differences between the original Adventure
 and 2.5:
 
+............................................................................
 > The bulk of the points come from five new 16-point treasures.  (I say "bulk"
 > because I think at least one of the scores included some padding and I may
 > have tweaked those.)  Each of the new treasures requires solving a puzzle
@@ -105,6 +106,34 @@ and 2.5:
 > succumb even given access to the game source.  You really need to fit
 > together not only the goals and the map and use of inventory space, but
 > also details like just what _can_ you do in the dark...?
+............................................................................
+
+== Earlier non-influences ==
+
+There is record of one earlier dungeon-crawling game called "dnd",
+written in 1974-75 on the PLATO system at University of Illinois
+<<DND>>.  This was in some ways similar to later roguelike games but
+not to Adventure.  The designers of later roguelikes frequently site
+Adventure as an influence, but not dnd; like PLATO itself, dnd seems
+not to have become known outside of its own user community until
+rediscovered by computer historians many years after Adventure
+shipped.
+
+There was also Hunt The Wumpus <<WUMPUS>>, written by Gregory Yob in
+1972. There is no evidence that Yob's original (circulated
+in BASIC among microcomputer enthusiasts) was known to the ARPANET-
+and minicomputer-centered culture Crowther and Woods were part of
+until well after Adventure was written.
+
+(I was a developer of the Nethack roguelike early in that game's
+history; we knew of Hunt The Wumpus then from its early Unix port, but
+it didn't influence us either, nor in any apparent way the designers
+of other early roguelikes. After my time the wumpus was included as a
+monster in Nethack, but this was done in a spirit of conscious
+museumization after historians rediscovered Yob's game.)
+
+Neither of these games used an attempt at a natural-language parser
+even as primitive as Adventure's.
 
 == Nomenclature ==
 
@@ -115,11 +144,16 @@ versions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and for all I know higher than that.  It seems
 best just to start a new numbering series while acknowledging the
 links back.
 
-We have reverted to "Advent" for the binary to avoid a name collision
+We have reverted to "advent" for the binary to avoid a name collision
 with the BSD Games version.
 
 == Functional changes in Open Adventure ==
 
+By default, advent issues "> " as a command prompt.  This feature
+became common in many variants after the original 350-point version,
+but was never backported into Crowther & Woods's main line before now.
+The "-o" (oldstyle) version reverts the behavior.
+
 A "seed" command has been added.  This is not intended for human use
 but as a way for game logs to set the PRNG (pseudorandom-number generator) so
 that random events (dwarf & pirate appearances, the bird's magic word)
@@ -139,12 +173,23 @@ The adventure.text file is no longer required at runtime.  Instead, it
 is compiled at build time to a source module containing C structures,
 which is then linked to the advent binary.
 
+The game-save format has changed.  This was done to simplify
+FORTRAN-derived code that formerly implemented these functions;
+without C's fread(3)/fwrite() and structs it was necessarily pretty
+ugly by modern stabdards. Encryption and checksumming have been
+discarded - it's pointless to try tamper-prooing saves when everyone
+has the source code.
+
 == Sources ==
 
 [bibliography]
 
 - [[[IFA]]] http://rickadams.org/adventure/
 
-- [[[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
+- [[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
 
 - [[[SN]]] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html
+
+- [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game)
+
+- [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus