Documentation polishing.

[open-adventure.git] / history.adoc

diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc
index 7c8bff6d97220be292f6a41eb4c9701c0b2c4eb5..86f49034250544adb7364605496f07b2ad169951 100644 (file)
--- a/history.adoc
+++ b/history.adoc
@@ -2,9 +2,11 @@
 by Eric S. Raymond
 
 Adventure is the fons et origo of all later dungeon-crawling computer
-games, the grandaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed
+games, the granddaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed
 artifacts of hacker folklore.
 
+== Origin and history ==
+
 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
 writing what we could now call firmware for the earliest ARPANET
@@ -48,10 +50,13 @@ that IFA's historical claims are thinly sourced and its dates for the
 earliest releases don't match either comments in the code or the
 careful reconstruction in <<SN>>.
 
-Future versions of this document may attempt to untangle some of the
-non-mainline history. For now, it will suffice to explain the chain of
-provenance that led from the original Adventure to the version
-distributed with this document.
+== Open Adventure ==
+
+An attempt to untangle and document a lot of the non-mainline history
+has been made by Arthur O'Dwyer at <<QUUX>>.  For our purposes, it
+will suffice to explain the chain of provenance that led from the
+original Adventure to the Open Adventure distributed with this
+document.
 
 The original 350-point ADVENT on the PDP-10 had been one of my
 formative experiences as a fledgling hacker in 1976-77. Forty years
@@ -109,12 +114,20 @@ and 2.5:
 > also details like just what _can_ you do in the dark...?
 ............................................................................
 
+Great care has been taken to preserve 2.5's exact gameplay as intended
+by Don.  However, under the hood Open Adventure is rather different from
+2.5.  Where 2.5 was written in FORTRAN mechanically translated into extremely
+ugly C, Open Adventure has been translated into much more modern and
+idiomatic C.  The extremely cryptic and opaque format of the original
+database of rooms, objects, and strings has been moved to YAML;
+this makes the brilliant design of it much easier to comprehend.
+
 == 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
+not to Adventure.  The designers of later roguelikes frequently cite
 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
@@ -132,7 +145,7 @@ 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.)
+well after historians rediscovered Yob's game.)
 
 Neither of these games used an attempt at a natural-language parser
 even as primitive as Adventure's.
@@ -150,3 +163,5 @@ even as primitive as Adventure's.
 - [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game)
 
 - [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus
+
+- [[[QUUX]]] https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent