Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 07:16:11 +0000 (UTC) From: Reply-To: To: "Arthur O'Dwyer" Cc: Greg Gazanian , Bob Silverman , Charles Richmond , Jason Dyer , Carl Ruby , Nathanael Culver Message-ID: <568171862.2175136.1574147771592@mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: References: <435260345.127117.1573019785293.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <435260345.127117.1573019785293@mail.yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Dave E Long and Adventure I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that Dave Long is not too excited about talking about a game he wrote almost 40 years ago. However it does make me feel bad that I didn't try to get back in contact with him earlier. I had found the d.long@ix.netcom.com address back in 2008, but always seemed to be too busy to contact him. He might have had more interest in talking about Adventure when it was only 30 years past. :-) I have been meaning to add some information to my web page better explaining the Dave Long branch of Adventure, and how I know about it. Knowing that Long is not likely to respond to me either spurred me to go ahead and write something up. I'm including the first draft in this message. Let me know what you think, and if anything needs more explanation. I hope I can use this to answer some persistant questions. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timeline of Dave Long's versions of Adventure --------------------------------------------- Late 1977 - 1978: Dave Long develops LONG0500 from WOOD0350 code in FORTRAN-IV (AKA F66) for DEC System 20. 1978 - Early 1979: Dave Long gives a complete (or at least running) copy of the code for LONG0500 to system programmers at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). They convert it to run on the Prime mini-computer in use there. Fall 1979: I start classes at IIT and almost immediately discover Adventure on the Prime computer. Spring 1980: Dave Long visits IIT to give a talk about the natural language processing done by his extended versions of Adventure for command input. At that time, he presents a tape with the LONG0751 source to the Prime system programmers. May 1980: The head system programmer, who did most of the conversion of LONG0500 for Prime, graduates. Without him, work on converting LONG0751 to run on Prime systems comes to a stop. Sometime 1980: I complete a game of LONG0500, and after that can look at the source code. May 1990: The code for ANON0501 is posted in the Usenet group comp.sources.games. From the Prime-specific system calls included in it, I can tell it was descended from the IIT code. Because it doesn't have any author attributions past Dave Long people question me as to why I don't call it LONG0501. It is apparent to me that the changes are less "professional" than Dave Long's, but I have no concrete proof. May 1990: Doug McDonald makes the code for ANON0551 available for anonymous FTP. It has been changed more for a VAX environment, but it still has some Prime-isms to show that it has also descended from the IIT Prime code. April 1993: I exchange some email with Dave Long at University of Chicago. He gave me access to one of their DEC-20 systems so that I could run LONG0751. The machine was being decommissioned in a few weeks, so I didn't have much time to play. Unfortunately I didn't get very far. Concerning ANON0501 ------------------- Since I added ANON0501 to my family tree, I've gotten questions from people asking why I didn't call it LONG0501. Since I had played through LONG0500, and had some exposure to LONG0751, it seemed clear to me that this version had only small changes that came from someone other than Dave Long. Unfortunately, I didn't have any sort of concrete proof, and access to LONG0500 seems to be uncommon. I do think that there are some convincing arguments to explain that this is so. 1) The star sapphire LONG0500 introduced a number of new locations. One of these was the star-shaped chamber. This location contained the star sapphire, which was a treasure. (The star chamber / star sapphire wording was the type of word play that Long enjoyed.) In ANON0501, this object is replaced in the database with the FLY. The location is still there, but does not contain the sapphire. However, in ANON0551/MCDO0551 the star sapphire can be found in the star chamber. Also, references to the sapphire can be found in the solution file for LONG0751, as well as the QBASIC code from RUBY0751. 2) The poster in the wellhouse In ANON0501, the poster in the wellhouse announces "Here comes WIZZ!", while in LONG0500, ANON0551/MCDO0551 and LONG0751/RUBY0751 the poster is from the "John Dillinger Died for You Society". More signs that the changes were not by Long. Long's relationship with IIT ---------------------------- Although no one has asked me, some might wonder why Dave Long gave copies of his software to programmers at IIT. In the late 70's to early 80's, games like ADVENTURE could only be run at colleges or large companies that had big enough computers. In this environment Dave Long tried to do something unusual and actually SELL copies of his Adventure games. However, while writing the code in FORTRAN made it somewhat portable the unhappy truth was that ever computer system had it's own local dialect of FORTRAN. To make it easier to sell the game, Long would give a copy to IIT (and I assume other institutions) to be translated and debugged, and in return he would get a copy that should run with few changes on a new computer architecture. -- Russel Dalenberg russeld@pobox.com