This game made me want to become a programmer.
Via Rodd Clarkson
Originally shared by Luft Hans
Colossal Cave Adventure now available as Free Software and in GitLab.
“This code is a forward-port of the Crowther/Woods Adventure 2.5 from 1995, last version in the main line of Colossal Cave Adventure development written by the original authors. The authors have given permission and encouragement to this release.”
John Hardy Developer 
There was a game simply called Adventure on the Osbourne. It might have been a port or something like that. My first game was that one.
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A colleague of mine worked for Digital, and got a good subsidy for his house from the employer. Good old Alta Vista times )
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It was open source before. ESR’s done his usual masterful self-promotion work.
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It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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The game has, in fact, always been open source, since it was developed using Arpanet resources. Which is why it was available so many places. I played it on a CDC 6600 in my university’s computer center, for instance.
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Yay! my old friend a VT100.
those things were indestructible.
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Kirill Gorelov that was Zork which was the second reason why I wanted to become a programmer.
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I loved the Scott Adams adventure games.
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mathew murphy Yep. It’s been open-source for decades. That’s why it was ported to so many platforms in the 70s & 80s.
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Jon Mallin I first played it on a friend’s CP/M system in the late 70s or early 80s.
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John Hardy Turnbull delenda est Zork was one of many ADVENT ports.
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w, w, open door, pick key, open green chest, i.
I made a couple of text adventure game, one was a confidential, coded in HPL, during free time on drilling rigs between Angola, Congo, Gabon and Nigeria: “Escape from Stominara” (you lost your passport and there is an army coup in the republic of Stomimara. Your aim is to escape safely).
My first commercial success was “Rigel”, 5 years before, which was more advanced, a mix of adventure and strategy. Then I had Argolath and Ethnos.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/6uObuph9MDy1cQNpxirgp8aUtED974FiIAyabgdKMiwEBnmAEuByr2X13OV_TEhSIMXvad8kExc
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Woah! That’s awesome Olivier Malinur Great cassette artwork! Does the code still exist? I sold some copies of a text adventure I wrote back in the 1980s (in BASIC on cassette for an obscure model of computer) but I never preserved any code I wrote until the internet came along.
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Same for me. All codes lost.
There are some images of Ethnos code available on the net.
Rigel sold “pretty well, about 3000-5000 copies.
Ethnos sold in the same ranges. Argolath was around 3000-4000.
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Those are real numbers! Quite something. I’m jealous 😉
I was writing for the ZX81 as well with the (somewhat unreliable 16K wart stuck on the back). Saving and loading from cassette tape was always a moment of high tension.
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Suddenly I feel like I’m in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike
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…played on a VT100 dumb terminal. I’d love to get my hands on a real one of those. Oh well, I’ll just have to play this game on my VT-100 emulator.
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Ramin Honary IIRC, VT100s weren’t all that dumb by the standards of the day. I once had an ADM-3A dumb terminal that made Trump look smart. It couldn’t do lower case, & didn’t even have a microprocessor in it. I don’t think it could even backspace.
But ADVENT can even be played on a legit paper & ink TTY, such as the classic ASR-33.
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God Emperor Lionel Lauer I’ve never worked with any “hard” dumb terminal, but there are days when I think it might be a bit of fun to try using one to do real work, as long as the work wasn’t too pressing.
When you mentioned the ASR-33, it reminded me of this video where a hobbyist hooked up an Altair 8800 (or it may have been a replica Altair) to an ASR-33 by entering the terminal driver by hand the on the panel switches, then he used the ASR-33 tape reader to load 4K BASIC. youtube.com – Altair 8800 – Video #7.1 – Loading 4K BASIC with a Teletype
Do you think ADVENT is small enough to run on Altair BASIC, or (if there isn’t enough memory) perhaps if the text were loaded on demand from additional paper tapes? I’m genuinely curious.
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Ramin Honary I honestly don’t know. I believe that it was originally written in Fortran, but I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been ported to Basic at some time. At a complete guess, I’d imagine that Adventure would need 4-8K on top of whatever the language needs. I don’t recall how much RAM the Altairs came with, but I do recall that 16KB RAM cards were a desirable but expensive product at the time. I would guess that Altairs came with 4 or 8K.
No, it wouldn’t be practical to demand-page paper tape; sequential storage is only really practical for sequentially accessed data, which this very much isn’t.
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I first played ADVENT (Zork) on a teletype printer. I must have gone through reams of fanfold paper.
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Ah, teletype.
My first real job with real computers, the kind that crush your foot if you happen to place the computer on it (how that would happen I don’t know, unless you was able to lift 400+ kg).
Was a Prime 750, a computer with card for memory, terminal I/O, disk I/O, CPU etc. Each card size of a super large pizza box. The teletype printer was great log, but took about a box or two a week for log print.
Fun computer and OS, heritage from Multics, which was fun. Never had a computer that could work so stable after that. Yes, it had Zork, and Emacs, and WordPerfect.
Ordinary users used yellow screen terminals, called PT200. Ah, memories.
Ah, yes. What made me want to learn programming was a Prolog program where they had Hobbits relations programmed. Could even understand the program.
That must have been around 1980.
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Anyway. Try out this program, if you want to try out the feeling of old, slow, after burning screens. 🙂
github.com – Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
https://launchpad.net/~bugs-launchpad-net-falkensweb/+archive/ubuntu/cool-retro-term
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Anders Jackson I use amber text on dark grey as my default xterm config, because I find it less tiring on my eyes. I do actually have a 3270 font, but the novelty wore off for me after a while, & low-res fonts in general are something that I don’t miss at all.
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My first computer was an Apple IIe with a green phosphorous terminal. I occasionally set my VT-100 emulator to green/black with an old-timey font, but for the most part I keep it black and white with a readable monospaced font and at a reasonably large size on HDMI monitor.
I also like the Amiga grey-on-blue color scheme, which was also used by the MS-DOS text editor EDIT, both of which I also loved using when I was a kid.
Anders Jackson that Cool Retro Term is beautifully made, but I don’t use it because it has some 200MB of package dependencies, all Qt-related libraries which I generally avoid using (I prefer Gtk+).
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