The game was also ported to Prime Computer's super-mini running PRIMOS in the late 1970s, utilising Fortran 4, and to IBM mainframes running VM/CMS in late 1978, utilizing PL/1. In 1977, Jim Gillogly of the RAND Corporation spent several weeks porting the code from Fortran to C under Unix, with the agreement of both Woods and Crowther. (See the original source code) The program required about 60K words (nearly 300KB) of core memory in order to run, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128K words. Until the 2007-2008 academic year, students at Stanford University were required to re-implement the game as an assignment in the first computer programming course.Ĭrowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of Fortran code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10. A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll. The version that is best known today was the result of a collaboration with Don Woods, a graduate student who discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University and made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing. Ĭrowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in the early 1970s, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created during the 1975-76 academic year and featuring fantasy elements such as an axe-throwing dwarf and a magic bridge. Crowther was a spelunker, who applied his experience in Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky) to create a game that he could enjoy with his young daughters. Will Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, which developed the ARPANET (a forerunner of the Internet).
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