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

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bug (computing), bugs or exp ...

and computer

programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...

. 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 while both were attending Princeton in 1972 to produce the unprecedented, excursive INTERCAL programming language. 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 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...

. He also co-authored "The Hacker's Dictionary" with Mark Crispin, 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 computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

, 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 network, 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 ...

. 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 games.Jerz, Dennis G. (Summer 2007)
Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave
'' Digital Humanities Quarterly''. 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 (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text Command (computing), commands to control Player character, characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narrati ...

. 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'' 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 recei ...

for a human history of this period).

Biography

Early programming career

Work on ''Adventure''

References

Further reading