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Will and his first wife Pat Crowther were active and dedicated cavers in the 1960s and early 1970s—both were part of many expeditions to connect the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems. Pat played a key role in the September 9, 1972 expedition that finally made the connection. (Brucker, 1976, p. 299)
During the early 1970s Crowther worked at defense contractor and Internet pioneer Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). Following his divorce from Patricia, Crowther began using his spare time to develop a simple text-based adventure game in FORTRAN on BBN's PDP-10 minicomputer. He created it as a diversion his daughters Sandy and Laura could enjoy when they came to visit. (Montfort, 2003, pp. 85–87)
In this game, the player would move around an imaginary cave system by entering simple, two-word commands and reading text describing the result. Crowther used his extensive knowledge of cave exploration as a basis for this, and there are many similarities between the locations in the game and those in Mammoth Cave, particularly its Bedquilt section. (Montfort, 2003, p. 88) In 1975 Crowther released the game on the early ARPANET system, of which BBN was a prime contractor. (Montfort, 2003, p. 89)
In Spring of 19761976 is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). Events January January 12 UN Security Council votes 11-1 to admit the Palestinian Liberation Organization January 15 Would-be Gerald Ford presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore is s, he was contacted by Stanford researcher Don WoodsDon Woods is a perennial hacker and computer programmer. Woods teamed with James Lyon while both were attending Princeton in 1972 to produce the unprecedented, excursive INTERCAL programming language. Later, he worked at the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), where, seeking his permission to enhance the game. Crowther agreed, and Woods developed several enhanced versions on a PDP-10 housed in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) where he worked. (Montfort, 2003, p. 89) Over the following decade the game gained in popularity, being ported to many operating systems, including personal-computer platform CP/MCP/M C ommand P rocessor for M icrocomputers was an operating system for Intel 8080/ 85 and Zilog Z80 based microcomputers. It was created by Digital Research, Inc. founded by Gary Kildall. The combination of CP/M and S-100 bus computers patterned on the.
A number of the basic features invented by Will Crowther were carried forward by the designers of later adventure games—in particular the ZorkZ-machine interpreters, as well as the older models it was made for originally. Zork one of the first works of interactive fiction (a form of adventure game), was an early descendant of ADVENT (also known as Colossal Cave). The first version of Zork was w adventures show this ancestry particularly clearly.