Don't output disused dungeon data.

[open-adventure.git] / history.adoc

diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc
index 743ed619af2d0fd906572abfa50c9ec83e3b08f6..8a0f8bf4b8b694bae802aaba3900d3f88dcb64f0 100644 (file)
--- 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.
 
@@ -114,17 +114,26 @@ 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 explanation, but not dnd; like PLATO itself, dnd seems
-not to have become known outside of its home university until
+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. Though the wumpus was later included as a monster in the Nethack
-roguelike game, 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.
+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 ==
 
@@ -164,6 +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]