X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?a=blobdiff_plain;f=history.adoc;h=8a0f8bf4b8b694bae802aaba3900d3f88dcb64f0;hb=8a18f2f19fe1c8b746d43c21d7ee51ca622554c6;hp=30afeba90d4ccd76f3aea763eca4fdb8fb6b52d8;hpb=8da6c9e4de435b420bc6f7679488172c64d44148;p=open-adventure.git

diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc
index 30afeba..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.
 
@@ -108,6 +108,33 @@ and 2.5:
 > 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 ==
 
 This project is called "Open Adventure" because it's not at all clear
@@ -146,6 +173,13 @@ 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]
@@ -155,3 +189,7 @@ which is then linked to the advent binary.
 - [[[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