Dennis, I’m still hoping you make this into a book. I’m also glad you brought the insights and methods together from two “publishable units” in this piece. This rich work that you’ve done can lead in many directions – for instance, branching out into other “recreational computing” programs of that era and explaining how common, or unusual, things like writing programs for one’s family and friends were, and how often there was longitudinal collaboration of this sort between people who didn’t communicate except to ask for the code. Plus, it would be interesting to know if other textual descriptions of caves by cavers (in books or letters, for instance) differed from the first Adventure description. And, something I’ve always wondered: Did Crowther actually code Adventure offline on his Teletype, only taking his paper tape in to run it on the PDP-1 after he’d amassed a great deal of code? If this was done, was it typical, or did the few recreational programmers of the time usually hack interactively? If he didn’t program interactively, that could certainly explain the bugs here and there…

Anyway, after reading the article again, I wanted to restate that the piece is a very nice illumination of Adventure. It can also provide a great platform from which to ask a lot of questions like these, which could connect Adventure to 1970s computing and the origins of computer gaming in a really interesting way.

I contacted the Digital Humanities Quarterly editor (Julia Flanders)
today and here is what she replied:

Thanks for asking–the link to the Jerz article was posted somewhat
prematurely, and links (linked) to an internal draft site, not to the
final publication. The actual published version of the article will
be available at the DHQ site by the end of this month, at
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html

If you can spread this information around we’d be grateful! the
internal URL got widely disseminated before we could correct it.

Best wishes, Julia

Julia Flanders
Editor, DHQ
Brown University

Dennis later posted:

David Kinder just e-mailed me to say he has placed a copy of the
article on the IF archive at: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/articles/original_adventure.zip (2.7M)

Reading it, I felt an intriguing sense of deja vu — reading the article itself reminds me of reading House of Leaves (in a good way, of course).