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Comment by fijiaarone | Hacker News Reader

So time sharing systems don’t get filled up with people playing games.

If you don't know the answer, why make up a fake one?

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)

> this is exactly what we told students.

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.

By the way, “Colossal Cave Adventure” was a retcon added at least 20 years later.

The game was originally called “advent”.

"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.

From the 4.2BSD UNIX User's Manual (2/1/1983)

    Adventure(6)
    ...
    DESCRIPTION
    The object of the game is to locate and explore Colossal Cave ...

So certainly before 1983.

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.

> The game was originally called “advent”

Just like the precursor to Zork was called “dungeo”[0], both due to a six character file name limit!

[0] https://dungeo.org/

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.

[1] https://github.com/PDP-10/its

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