When I was at university, my workaround was to patch the relevant bytes in the saved file to reset the timestamp. (Made even more convenient by running it via a wrapper script that automatically zeroed the timestamp on exit.)
Yep, comment lines from the original Crowther and Woods PDP-10 FORTRAN source code:
C SUSPEND. OFFER TO EXIT LEAVING THINGS RESTARTABLE, BUT REQUIRING A DELAY
C BEFORE RESTARTING (SO CAN'T SAVE THE WORLD BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING RISKY).
Yes. People who wrote games "Way Back Then" (wbt) did not see games as about high scores but as more like life choices. There is no save in life. So adventure and rogue (my poison of choice) were more about how to learn, how to adapt. How to fail gracefully (over and over again). Not that learning any of that is very much fun, but hey, that's life.
[edit misspell games fortunately there is save in HN]
Former Dec 10 time-sharing user and vax systems operator here, leeds uni 1980s: this is exactly what we told students.
When a power user reset the mud by ejecting its incore memory and the head of ops lost his finger-of-death status I think he was locked out for a week. (Mud, the first multi user dungeon had persistent state which was at risk if tops10 decided it needed the memory. Run enough large jobs, mud reinstalled)
That doesn't really answer my question. Whether it's what you told students or not, it is known to be false. The same question applies to "you" - why lie to the students like that?
New great excuse in town: "I used ChatGPT to generate this comment, it hallucinated". And because ChatGPT is right more often than human, this is even a pretty great one, you can just say "sorry I forgot to put a disclaimer it was ChatGPT".
That would have the opposite effect. If you don't want people to leave the game running when they're idle, you don't penalize the save-and-exit command.
"At least 20 years" is almost certainly an overstatement.
Slippage of what people call it is only to be expected for something that doesn't really formally give itself a title (ADVENT being more of a filename), and what it does most directly identify itself as became so synonymous with the genre. The game starts up with "WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!!" and then the instructions (if you ask for them) begin "SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE..." so the naming is not exactly out of left field.
You can pretty readily find evidence of people calling it "Colossal Cave" and "Colossal Cave Adventure" already in the 80s.
I think the first time I saw it (a Mac port from the early 90s or earlier among a pile of other free/shareware games on a set of floppies), it was called "Adventure," obviously also a popular choice for what to call the game, and my preference.
Single anecdata point here. In the early 80s I remember it being called "Adventure" when playing it on Apple 2 and I think IBM PCs. But not sure on the latter.
I first played it on a Commodore PET around 83 or so, but later got it for my Atari ST, probably around 87 and it was already called Colossal Cave then.
I also recall the name Colossal Cave from the mid-80s, although I also remember the name Advent. I think it was called both. One might be the file name and the other the formal name, or something.
I still want to try emulating[1] ITS someday, just to experience the original versions of emacs, zork/dungeon, macsyma, SHRDLU, ...
Though I imagine like an online community or game it can't really be recreated since it depended on its users at MIT and elsewhere, and its specific time and place in history.
While developing our new from-scratch Fortran compiler (LLVM Flang), getting the original Adventure game’s sources to compile was a key milestone for me, and I got lost in it for hours once it worked. Lots of great memories!
Is included on linux distros since a lot of time so there is no need to recompile it from source. I tried the game on console many years ago, but I remember it as boring wandering, basically. I never finished it.
I stand corrected. I didn't remembered any cave. What I was really playing was dunnet in emacs, that is cyberpunk themed
m-x dunnet
Dead end
You are at a dead end of a dirt road. The road goes to the east.
In the distance you can see that it will eventually fork off. The
trees here are very tall royal palms, and they are spaced equidistant
from each other.
There is a shovel here.
>
wandering, wandering...
> go southeast
The bear is very annoyed that you would be so presumptuous as to try and walk right by it. He tells you so by tearing your head off.
Couple of things: 1) the writeup says this has been written in Fortran but the files in the gitlab are .c/.h. Was it rewritten in C at some point? 2) no one's ported this to a browser version yet? WASM maybe? Sounds like a fun project.
Back in the day (that's 40+ years ago), I played this so many times. Forerunner to speed running: I tried to optimize the number of moved required to finish the entire game.
It's especially weird since the README encourages suspending the game every half hour or so.