The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, August 13, 2007

“You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike … ”

Accordingly, this paper analyzes previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods's student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005. In addition, new interviews with Crowther, Woods, and their associates (particularly members of Crowther's family) provide new insights on the precise nature of Woods's significant contributions. Real locations in the cave and several artifacts (such as an iron rod and an axe head) correspond to their representation in Crowther's version …

Via Flutterby, Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky

I remember first “playing” this game in 5th Grade (where “playing” involved the teacher reading the descriptions off the only Apple ][ in the school, asking us elementary students what to do next, and typing in the directions given) but it was later, in high school, when my friend Bill and I would play this game for hours (on his family's IBM PC), and I can still picture the map Bill made as we made our way through the game.

What's interesting about this report are the actual photographs from the cave system that show up in Adventure.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your take), there are no pictures of a grue—I guess the flashbulb scared him off.

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