Bottomless pits, dwarves, and huge fierce green snakes that bar the way, rod with rusty star, pay
troll, yellow canary - 1969.
Wumpas was a rewrite in Basic of adventure which was in PL/I.
Adam Thornton wrote:
On Jun 3, 2008, at 4:21 PM, Stephen Frazier wrote:
No, I meant 1970. It was one of the first games that ran on the
computer centers TSO system. (It seems like it had another name before
it was called TSO but I don't remember it.) Startrek and Football were
the others. They all appeared about 1969. I don't remember which was
first. Adventure was written in PL/I and Startrek was in Fortran.
Football was in another language. (Cobol? or Basic? maybe) I wrote the
OU version of adventure in my spare time while working on the help
desk. The university version wasn't that much different it just had
the names changed and a few new passages added. "You are in an
administration building filled with twisty little passages all alike."
I left the help desk in 1973 to work for DHS as a programmer.
I will be eternally grateful if anyone can come up with documentation
showing Adventure to have bee0n played before 1975. A dated printout of
a session transcript would197 be ideal, or even a dated listing showing the
file resident on some system.
I'm guessing that what's going on here is conflation of "Adventure" and
something sorta-kinda-similar, like "Hunt the Wumpus" (Gregory Yob,
Dartmouth BASIC, 1972 or earlier)--it had definitely migrated to
"mainframes" by 1972 according to Wikipedia and was first published in
1973, so I would not be surprised if *it* were around in 1970.
Bottomless pits, bats, and dodecahedrons? Wumpus. Bottomless pits,
dwarves, and huge fierce green snakes that bar the way? Adventure.
Adam
--
Stephen Frazier
Information Technology Unit
Oklahoma Department of Corrections
3400 Martin Luther King
Oklahoma City, Ok, 73111-4298
Tel.: (405) 425-2549
Fax: (405) 425-2554
Pager: (405) 690-1828
email: stevef%doc.state.ok.us
