Donald R. Woods (born April 30, 1954) is an American

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

and computer

programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

. He is best known for his role in the development of the ''

Colossal Cave Adventure ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' (also known as ''Adventure'' or ''ADVENT'') is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the ...

'' game.

Biography

Early programming career

Woods teamed with

James M. Lyon James is a common English language surname and given name: *James (name), the typically masculine first name James * James (surname), various people with the last name James James or James City may also refer to: People * King James (disambiguat ...

while both were attending

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

in 1972 to produce the unprecedented, excursive

INTERCAL programming language The Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym (INTERCAL) is an esoteric programming language that was created as a parody by Don Woods and , two Princeton University students, in 1972. It satirizes aspects of the various programming langua ...

. Later, he worked at the

Stanford AI lab Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center ...

(SAIL), where among other things he became the SAIL contact for, and a contributor to, the

Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANE ...

. He also co-authored "The Hacker's Dictionary" with

Mark Crispin Mark Reed Crispin (July 19, 1956 in Camden, New Jersey – December 28, 2012 in Poulsbo, Washington) is best known as the father of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledg ...

, Raphael Finkel, and Guy L. Steele Jr."The computer contradictionary" by Stan Kelly-Bootle

Work on ''Adventure''

Woods discovered the ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' game by accident on a SAIL computer in 1976. After contacting the original author by the (now antiquated) means of sending an e-mail to crowther@''sitename'', where ''sitename'' was every host listed on

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foun ...

, he heard back from William Crowther shortly afterward. Given the go-ahead, Woods proceeded to add enhancements to the ''Adventure'' game, and then distributed it on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

. It became very popular, especially with users of the

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

. Woods stocked the Kentucky cave that Crowther had written with new magical items, creatures, and geographical features. Crowther's game, which originally featured few supernatural elements, was transformed into a loose fantasy world featuring elements from

role playing game A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal ac ...

s.Jerz, Dennis G. (Summer 2007)
Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave
''

Digital Humanities Quarterly ''Digital Humanities Quarterly'' is a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. The journal is also a community experiment in journal publication. The journal is funded and published by th ...

''. Woods can thus, in a sense, be considered one of the progenitors of the entire genre of computer

adventure game An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based m ...

s and

interactive fiction '' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the ...

. By 1977 tapes of the game were common on the Digital user group

DECUS The Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society (DECUS) was an independent computer user group related to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The Connect User Group Community, formed from the consolidation in May, 2008 of DECUS, Encompass, HP- ...

, and others (see ''

The Soul of a New Machine ''The Soul of a New Machine'' is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous ...

'' by

Tracy Kidder John Tracy Kidder (born November 12, 1945) is an American writer of nonfiction books. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his '' The Soul of a New Machine'' (1981), about the creation of a new computer at Data General Corporation. He has rece ...

for a human history of this period). ><

Biography

Early programming career

Work on ''Adventure''

References

Further reading