William Crowther (programmer)

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William Crowther
Computer programmer, caver
Spouse(s)Patricia Crowther (until 1976), Nancy S. Crowther (married 1980-present)

William Crowther (born 1936) is an American

text adventure game genre
.

Biography

IMP Team (left to right): Truett Thatch, Bill Bartell, Dave Walden, Jim Geisman, Robert Kahn, Frank Heart, Ben Barker, Marty Thorpe, Will Crowther, Severo Ornstein

During the early 1970s, Crowther worked at

Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he was part of the original small ARPAnet
development team. His implementation of a distributed distance vector routing system for the ARPAnet was an important step in the evolution of the internet.

Crowther met and married

B.S. in physics in 1958.[1]

Adventure

Following his divorce from his wife, Crowther used his spare time to develop a text-based adventure game in Fortran on BBN's PDP-10. He created it as a diversion his daughters Sandy and Laura could enjoy when they came to visit.[2]

Crowther wrote:[3]

I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and also I had been actively exploring in caves - Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in particular. Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids. Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing. My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun.

In

ARPAnet system, of which BBN was a prime contractor.[6]

In the spring of 1976, he was contacted by Stanford researcher

operating systems, including personal-computer platform CP/M
.

The basic game structure invented by Crowther (and based in part on the example of the

parser) was carried forward by the designers of later adventure games. Marc Blank and the team that created the Zork adventures cite Adventure as the title that inspired them to create their game. They later founded Infocom
and published a series of popular text adventures.

Caving

The location of the game in Colossal Cave was not a coincidence. Crowther and his first wife Pat were active and dedicated cavers in the 1960s and early 1970s—both were part of many expeditions to connect the

Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems. Pat played a key role in the September 9, 1972 expedition that finally made the connection.[7] Indeed, even during his time working at BBN, his colleagues noticed that Crowther spent a fair amount of time doing chin-ups in doorframes, which apparently helped him concentrate.[8]

As a member of the

New York State.[9] He began climbing there in the 1950s and continues to climb. He made the first ascent of several classic routes including Arrow, Hawk, Moonlight, and Senté.[citation needed] Some of these routes sparked controversy because protection bolts were placed on rappel, a new tactic that Crowther and several others began to use at the time. The community reaction to this technique was an important part of the evolution of climbing ethics in the Shawangunks and beyond.[citation needed
]

Later career

Crowther worked at

Yosemite and elsewhere. In 1983 he left Xerox and went back to Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He became active with the Appalachian Mountain Club
and every year helped teach rock climbing to beginners. He continued doing that each spring until 2013.

In the 1990s,

Cisco Systems bought the part of BBN where Crowther was working. He continued to work for Cisco until his retirement in 1997[citation needed] to live in Delanson, New York
with his second wife Nancy.

References

  1. Charles Babbage Institute. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 30, 2018. Retrieved July 29, 2020.{{cite interview}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link
    )
  2. ISBN 978-0-262-63318-5
    .
  3. ISBN 978-0-8359-2434-4
    .
  4. ^ Evans, Claire L. (July 15, 2020). "This Woman Inspired One of the First Hit Video Games by Mapping the World's Longest Cave". OneZero. Retrieved March 23, 2022.
  5. ISBN 978-0-262-63318-5
    .
  6. ^
    ISBN 978-0-262-63318-5
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-8093-1322-8
    .
  8. ISBN 978-0-684-83267-8
    .
  9. ISBN 978-0-8117-6767-5
    .

Bibliography

External links

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