Don Woods

Donald R. Woods, born on 30 April 1954, is an American programmer and hacker best known for his part in creating Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the earliest text adventure games and a founding work of interactive fiction. While studying at Princeton in 1972 he worked with James M. Lyon on INTERCAL, a deliberately eccentric programming language. He later worked at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he became that laboratory's contact for the Jargon File and co-authored The Hacker's Dictionary with Mark Crispin, Raphael Finkel and Guy L. Steele Jr. In 1976 he found William Crowther's Adventure on a computer there, tracked down its author by e-mailing every ARPANET host, and with Crowther's permission added new magical items, creatures and places, turning a cave simulation with few supernatural elements into a loose fantasy world with role playing influences. His version spread widely on the Internet, especially among PDP-10 users, and by 1977 tapes of it were common in the DECUS user group. For this reason he is regarded as one of the progenitors of the computer adventure game genre.