Colossal Cave Adventure—now more commonly known as Adventure—doesn’t look like a game in the modern sense. There are no images or animations, no joysticks or controllers. Instead, blocks of text describe sections of a cave in the second person, like so:
You are in a splendid chamber thirty feet high. The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone. An awkward canyon and a good passage exit from the east and west sides of the chamber. A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
In order to interact with this cave, players type terse imperative commands, like GO WEST or GET BIRD, which trigger fresh onslaughts of description. Adventure’s puzzles are an endless shuffle of magical inventory: to pass the snake coiled in the Hall of the Mountain King, you must unleash the bird from its cage, but you can’t GET BIRD if you’re in possession of the black rod, because the bird is afraid of the rod, and in turn, the crystal bridge will not appear without a wave of the rod, and all the while you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different—or worse, all alike.
This would have been familiar to Will’s colleagues from the ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaign they sometimes played after work. In D&D, a game with no winnable objective, a godlike “Dungeon Master” describes scenes in detail, prompting players at actionable decision points. But Will wrote the game for his young daughters. After the divorce, Sandy and Laura came to expect that they’d play computer games whenever they visited their father. According to a researcher who interviewed members of the Cave Research Foundation, “Another caver who was with the Crowthers on an expedition in the summer of 1975 reports that one glance at ‘Adventure’ was enough to identify it immediately as a cathartic exercise, an attempt by Will to memorialize a lost experience.”
Once he’d finished coding, Will saved a compiled version of the game on a BBN computer and left for a monthlong vacation. It might have stayed there, untouched and unremembered, save for the Crowther girls, had his computer not been connected to the new computer network his company had helped to build. By the time Will finished his vacation, Adventure had been discovered by people across the ARPANET. Where Patricia linked caves, Will linked nodes, and Adventure, a mental map of the long expeditions they took together, traveled wherever those links were forged.
Adventure was a phenomenon. The game was as unforgiving as caving itself. It was maddening to navigate—a “harrowing of Hell,” proposed one writer who tried it—and addictive to play. Productivity in computer science labs ceased every time Adventure made landfall on a terminal. An Adventure devotee at Stanford, Don Woods, modified the code further by adding fantasy elements—an underground volcano, a battery-dispensing machine—to Crowther’s austere descriptions. Adventure’s journey into the earth is now considered a foundational text of computer culture. Hundreds of players took their chances on it, then thousands, each scribbling their own hand-drawn maps of the subterranean world Will described.
It must have been strange for Pat. By the time she encountered Adventure firsthand, at a Cave Research Foundation meeting in Boston sometime in 1976 or 1977, she was Patricia Wilcox, having married the leader of the 1972 expedition. Will’s computer game proved a delightful oddity for the experienced cavers in their circle, and indeed for anyone who knew Mammoth well. In Boston, the foundation spent much of their meeting playing Adventure. Because they played the more popular version supplemented by Don Woods, who had embellished sections of the game, Patricia didn’t immediately recognize the cave it described. She told a researcher in 2002 that it was “completely different from the real cave.”
Except it wasn’t: Mammoth cavers who tried Adventure found they needed no maps. It was so accurate they could navigate it from memory. As the game spread, Adventure players who made pilgrimages to the real Mammoth Cave could scramble down the twisting passageways secure in their knowledge of the game’s virtual map. A former coworker of Will Crowther’s, recalling the topographical data stored on the computers at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, noted in 1985 that “Adventure’s Colossal Cave, at least up to a point (or down to a point) is the same as the one in Kentucky, and the description and geology of the first few levels are consistent and accurate.” That has been proven. In 2005, a group of researchers visiting the “source cave,” the Bedquilt section of Mammoth, was able to document clear parallels between the cave’s geology and Crowther’s descriptions.
Like the fluorescein dye with which speleologists trace the course of underground streams, Adventure’s version of caving culture stained the entire network. Cavers seek connections, which they discover through systematic survey, collective effort, and a willingness to forge ahead into the darkness, knowing full well that when the end appears, it may be a small place, a crack in the rock so tight only the wind can broach it. The game is a set of instructions for re-creating Mammoth; those instructions explode into pencil passageways, antechambers, and pits. Adventure can be won only with a map, just as caves are survived only by those who know the way back out. Steven Levy, in his history of computer culture, compares Adventure to the craft of programming itself, writing that “the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you’d be traveling in when you hacked assembly code. You could get dizzy trying to remember where you were in both activities.”
I’m telling you the story of the Mammoth Cave, of Stephen Bishop and Patricia Crowther and her husband Will, heartbroken as he memorialized their adventures in code, as a way of reminding you that every technological object, be it a map or a computer game, is also a human artifact. Its archaeology is always its anthropology. In fact, the most famous archaeologist to study Mammoth, Patty Jo Watson, inferred an entire agricultural economy from the grains digested by the corpses preserved in the cave’s constant temperature and humidity. To understand a people, we must know how they ate. To understand a program, we must know its makers—not only how they coded but for whom and why.
A half dozen turns into Adventure, a magic word appears on the cave wall. The real Mammoth Cave contains its share of carved messages—Patricia discovered the most important—but the “word” that shows up in Adventure, “XYZZY,” is Will’s invention. He added it for his sister, Betty Bloom, who came to stay with him after the divorce. She was one of Adventure’s original playtesters and a famously impatient sort. When typed, the magic word transports the player elsewhere in the game in a quick jump-flash, skipping the tedious steps along the way. According to Bloom, XYZZY, which Will pronounced “zizzy,” was a family password. His daughters were told to use it if they ever got lost or needed to identify themselves. It is the original cheat code.
The first academic to seriously consider Adventure was a woman, Mary Ann Buckles, who compared the game with folktales, chivalric literature, and the earliest uses of film, arguing that the growing cultural importance of computer technology that Adventure represented would lead to a democratization of computer use “analogous to the democratization of reading that characterized the spread of printing.” The literary critic Espen Aarseth, writing about the genre of forking digital literature that Adventure catalyzed, called it “a mythological urtext, located everywhere and nowhere.” Adventure created a genre of adventure games, which mutated from text interfaces to visual ones while retaining Crowther’s strange and compelling interplay of second-person description (There is a shiny brass lamp nearby) and imperative command (Get lamp). This developed into a textual physics used in virtual spaces all over the early Internet. In time, even people with no knowledge of cave adventures came to talk this talk.
Adventure has been remembered, celebrated, canonized, satirized. Crowther, who never made another game, is now considered interactive fiction’s J. D. Salinger. But the domestic context from which Adventure emerged bears exploring, too: Will Crowther wrote the code after divorcing the woman with whom he’d mapped the cave Adventure emulates. It was playtested by his sister, for whom he invented the game’s “magic word.” It was
created for the daughters he saw only on weekends and holidays and because he missed Patricia, or at the very least because she had instilled in him a love of the enveloping darkness.
Patricia Crowther had been a FORTRAN programmer at the Haystack Radio Observatory when she graduated from MIT. Like many technical women at the time, she left the computing industry behind to raise her children—and to cave, naturally. When she returned to work in the late 1970s, everything had changed. She went back to school, enrolling in all the undergraduate computer science courses the Indiana University of Pennsylvania had to offer, eventually taking a job as an instructor. In her classes, which were often attended by hundreds, she remembers seeing plenty of female students, but they would be the last generation of women to enter the field in substantial numbers. In the generation after Grace Hopper and her contemporaries, the professionalization of “software engineering” marked a sea change in the gender demographics of computing. By 1984, the number of women pursuing computer science degrees in the United States began to dive, and it has kept diving to this day, a decline unrivaled in any other professional field.
The Honeywell 316, the microcomputer at Will’s workplace that would become a router on the early Internet, has one more claim to fame. Honeywell made a model for women: with a built-in pedestal and a cutting board, it sold in the Neiman Marcus 1969 Christmas catalog as the Honeywell “Kitchen Computer.” It cost ten thousand dollars, came with an apron, and took two weeks of programming classes to learn how to operate, but the catalog picture shows a woman in a long floral dress unpacking a basket of groceries on top of the computer as though it were an extension of her kitchen counter. “If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute,” the copy says, implying that the computer has “more authority, power and intelligence than its female user.” And on her home turf to boot.
As Patricia’s ex-husband’s game grew in popularity, it was men who congregated around networked terminals to play it late into the night. It was men who scribbled cave maps on notepads lit by the electric glow of the screen. It was men who emerged dizzy in the light of day from each long crawl. And for all that Patricia accomplished, in the many tellings of the Adventure story, she has remained a background figure. Although she mapped and charted the subterranean world Will popularized with his game and made a physical leap into the unknown that few would even consider, her presence is a spectral outline of what might have been. She has been hidden in plain sight. The same could be said about many women in the early network era.
It’s fitting that the networked century’s inaugural collective experience would be Adventure. It’s a story about how intimately people influence software, and how wide its impact can be. And caves were always virtual worlds, the first places where human beings experienced the ontological disembodiment we now so strongly associate with projecting ourselves on-screen. By flickering firelight or by the shudder of a CRT monitor, we see beyond the real. Symbols applied to raw granite, to canvas, to code: all of it lights up the darkness.
There’s a lamp in the cave. Do you know what to do?
GET LAMP
Good. Now hold it tight, we’ll need to take it with us. We’ll take it through the twisting passages until they open wide to the other side and we can finally see the writing on the wall, a scrawl a hundred years old. It’s our magic word, our cheat code, our jump cut through the night. You can barely read it in the carbide light: Even when women were invisible, it never means they weren’t there.
Chapter Seven
RESOURCE ONE
It’s raining in California. Levee-busting rain, water rushing to the ground like a lover kept away by drought. In the Marin Headlands, north of San Francisco, the brackish tidal plains are throbbing, egrets buzz the grasses, screeching, and I’m waiting by a flooding bus stop, raindrops on my glasses. Sherry Reson pulls up in an old Camry, opens the driver’s side door just enough to poke a mop of curly hair out, and waves.
She drives me up the road to her place, a slate-gray bungalow weathered by the wind. On the way, she briefs me excitedly about the group she’s gathered, which we find perched around her dining room table, eating spongy feta, broad beans, and spinach salad from wooden bowls. As I divest myself of my wet outer layers, they look up cheerily from their conversation. They’ve been catching up. Only recently have they reconnected with one another, but forty years ago, alongside a hundred other dreamers, hippies, and iconoclasts, they all lived together in a technological commune in San Francisco called Project One.
They’ll explain to me that Project One was a mustard-yellow warehouse South of Market. Inside its eighty-four thousand square feet of interlinked habitations, they slept in hand-built bays one hundred feet wide and gathered for community meetings on the fifth floor that often ended in shouting matches and tears, or music and laughter, depending on the day. The stucco doors were tiled with mosaic patterns, there was a hot tub for communal bathing, and some residents lived in dollhouse estates of plywood and Sheetrock fastened together with nail guns. The commune’s children were herded by a former marine with a foot-long beard; he paraded them around the city, introducing them to Buddhist abbots, Rinpoches, Sikh gurus, and Taoist priests.
The writer Charles Raisch called Project One a “pueblo in the city,” a village peeled from the earth and turned inward until its edges met tip to tip. “It’s fifty of us sunbathing and barbecuing on the roof,” he wrote. “It’s seven turkeys and four bands and a bowling lane size, makeshift banquet with Dumpster roses.”
At Sherry’s house I meet four former Project One residents who have come from all corners of the Bay Area: beyond Sherry, there’s Pam Hardt-English, Mya Shone, and Chris Macie. Pam’s bay at Project One was a loft bed encased in air-gapped walls of red translucent plastic. Mya slept on a wooden pallet when she came from New York City with only the clothes on her back and dreams of becoming a full-time revolutionary. Sherry inherited a little house with white steps and a front door. They cooked on hot plates, shared bathrooms, and worked in the same building they called home, which was full of political organizations, artist studios, and production facilities. But even in a warehouse full of documentary filmmakers and Hair dropouts, their office was stranger than most. Right in the middle, encased in a clear box of Lexan polycarbonate sheeting, they kept a mainframe computer the size of ten refrigerators.
The computer, a Scientific Data Systems 940, was one of only fifty-seven of its kind on Earth. It was easily the most valuable thing in the building, an absolute treasure to this group of hippies. Pam, Sherry, Chris, and Mya were only a few among the rotating cast of its minders, all patrons of the community computer center they called Resource One.
Like the Honeywell 316, the SDS-940 was serious hardware, and it also contributed to the backbone of the early Internet: in 1969, when it was the best computer money could buy, an SDS-940 at Stanford became one of the ARPANET’s earliest hosts. By 1972, when Project One acquired theirs, the SDS-940 had become more Model T than Thunderbird, but it was still a $150,000 mainframe—far beyond the reach of twenty-somethings paying a nickel a square foot to live in a disused candy factory. And yet there it was, wired up by self-taught electricians who hauled “big noodles” of industrial power lines into their makeshift clean room. They had Pam to thank for that.
Pam Hardt-English is a deliberate, soft-spoken brunette with the studious air of a woman with well-kept secrets. She came alive at UC Berkeley, a flashpoint of the anti-war and Free Speech movements. “The school was on strike most of the time,” she remembers. Even the computer science department was organizing, and when the United States bombed Cambodia, “all the computer people got together,” she told a documentarian in 1972. “It was the first time many of them had ever been involved in anything. It was really exciting. We started talking about building communication networks.” In the summer of 1970, she and two fellow Berkeley computer science students, Chris Macie and Chris Neustrup, dropped out of school and moved
into Project One. They made it their mission to get the counterculture connected.
In a sense, it already was. The Bay Area was overrun with underground newspapers and houses with bulletin boards and free boxes in their front yards. The Berkeley Barb ran back-page ads for resistance organizations, and a group called the Haight-Ashbury Switchboard had even built a sophisticated phone tree in the late 1960s, linking human “switchboards” to one another to help distraught families track down their wandering hippie kids. This grew into an informal network of interest-specific Switchboards in the Bay Area, one of which, the San Francisco Switchboard, had offices at Project One. With a couple of phones and boxes of index cards, it coordinated extensive group action for quick-response incidents like the 1971 San Francisco Bay oil spill—an early version of the kind of organizing that happens so easily today on social media.
Resource One took up where these efforts left off, even inheriting the San Francisco Switchboard’s corporate shell. When Pam and the Chrises moved into the warehouse, their plan was to design a common information retrieval system for all the existing Switchboards in the city, interlinking their various resources into a database running on borrowed computer time. “Our vision was making technology accessible to people,” Pam explains. “It was a very passionate time. And we thought anything was possible.” But borrowing computer time to build such a database was far too limiting; if they were to imbue their politics into a computer system for the people, they’d need to build it from the ground up. They needed their own machine.
This was long before the personal computer as we know it, and long before even the microcomputer. Resource One had its sights on a mainframe system, the kind tended by experts in the large installations that had evolved from the efforts of early business programmers like Grace Hopper or Betty Holberton. Pam made a list of institutions and companies she thought might have a surplus mainframe lying around. After an exhaustive series of phone calls and meetings, she eventually cut a deal with the TransAmerica Leasing Corporation, which had a few SDS-940s gathering dust in a warehouse, one of them coming off three years of heavy use at Stanford. She convinced them by speaking the language of their common interest: the computer was worth more as a tax-deductible donation than it was obsolescing in storage. That’s how, in April 1972, on the bed of a semitruck, the People’s Computer came to be delivered to Project One.
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