Relicense to 2-clause BSD. Befin the history document.

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= A brief history of Colossal Cave Adventure =
by Eric S. Raymond
Adventure is the fons et origo of all later dungeon-crawling games,
the gandaddy of interacive fiction, and one of the hallowed artifacts
of hacker folklore.
The very first version was released by Crowther in 1976, in FORTRAN on
the PDP-10 at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. (Crowther was at the time
writing what we could now call firmware for the earliest ARPANET
routers) It was a maze game based on the Colossal Cave complex in
Kentucy, lacking the D&D-like elements now associated with the game.
Adventure as we now know it, the ancestor of all later versions, was
was released on a PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab by Don Woods in 1976
(some sources, apparentl erroneously, say 1977). That version is
sometimes known as 350-point Adventure.
Between 1976 and 1995 Crowther and Woods themselves continued to work
intermittently on the game. This main line of development cuminated
in the 1995 release of Adventure 2.5, also known as 430-point Adventure
The earliest port to C was by Jim Gillogly under an early Unix running
at the Rand Corporation in 1976; this version was later, and still is,
included in the BSD Games collection. It was blessed by Crowther and
Woods and briefly marketed in 1981 under the name "The Original
Adventure".
Many other people ported and extended the game in various directions.
A notable version was the first game shipped for the IBM Personal
Computer in 1981; this, for which neither Crowther nor Woods nor
Gillogly were paid royalties, what "The Original" was competing
against.
The history of these non-mainline versions is complex and
murky. Functional differences were generally marked by changes in the
maximum score as people added puzzles and rooms; however, multiple
ports of some versions existed - some in FORTRAN, some in C,
some in other languages - so the maximum point score is not
completely disambiguating.
Many versions are collected at The Interactive Fiction Archive
<<IFA>>. Same articles at <<DA>> are a narrative of the history of the
game. There is some divergence of dates between these; I have
preferred <<IF>> because its chronology makes better internal sense.
Future versions of this document may attempt to untangle some of that
history. For now, it will suffice to explain the chain of provenance
that led from the original Adventure to the version distributed with
this document.
The original 350-point ADVENT on the PDP-10 had been one of my
formative experiences as a fledgling hacker in 1976-77. Forty years
later, in February 2017, while doing some casual research into the
history of text adventure games, I looked through some source code at
<<IFA>> and was delighted to learn of Adventure 2.5, a version of the
Crowther-Woods mainline later than I had ever played.
Adventure 2.5 had been shipped long enough ago that today's conventions of
open-source licensing were not yet fully established. The Makefile
contained a rights reservation by Don Woods and that was it.
I wrote to Don asking permission to release 2.5 under 2-clause BSD;
he replied on 15 May giving both permission and encouragement.
== Sources ==
[bibliography]
- [[[IFA]]] http://rickadams.org/adventure/
- [[[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/