Don Woods
Don Woods (born April 30, 1954 ) is an American programmer . He is best known for his role in the development of the computer game Adventure .
Life
At Princeton University , Woods developed the esoteric programming language INTERCAL together with James M. Lyon in 1972 . He later worked at the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), where he contributed as an author to the hacker language lexicon Jargon File . Further stations in his working life were activities at Xerox , Sun Microsystems (where he worked on the NeWS system) and General Magic (for which he developed a web browser). From 2003 he worked for the email service Postini, which was bought by Google in 2007 . Woods integrated the Postini functions into Google's own email service Gmail .
Woods lives with his wife in Los Altos, California . The couple have two daughters.
Adventure
Woods discovered the Colossal Cave Adventure by chance in 1976 on a SAIL computer. He contacted the original author of the program by email . He received a swift reply from William Crowther .
With Crowther's approval, he began to write extensions to the text adventure and distributed it on the Internet . It became very popular with PDP-10 users in particular. Woods equipped the cave in Kentucky , which Crowther had written, with new magical objects, creatures and geographic features, and he added a point and memory system. The game, which originally contained few supernatural elements, was transferred to a free fantasy world with characteristics of an RPG . Woods can be seen as the progenitor of the whole genre of computer adventure games and interactive fiction .
Non-fiction
- Notes on Introductory Combinatorics (with George Pólya and Robert E. Tarjan ) . Birkhäuser, Basel 1983, ISBN 978-0-8176-3170-3 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Stan Kelly-Bootle: The computer contradictionary p. 105. ( books.google.de )
- ↑ Icynic.com: Don Woods. Retrieved April 20, 2017 .
- ↑ Filfre.net: The Completed Adventure, Part 3. Retrieved April 30, 2017 .
- ↑ Dennis G. Jerz: Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave. In: Digital Humanities Quarterly. (Summer 2007).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Woods, Don |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Woods, Donald R. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American hacker and programmer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 30, 1954 |