Early programming career Woods teamed with James M. Lyon while both were attending
Princeton in 1972 to produce the unprecedented, excursive
INTERCAL programming language. Later, he worked at the
Stanford AI lab (SAIL), where among other things he became the SAIL contact for, and a contributor to, the
Jargon File. He also co-authored "The Hacker's Dictionary" with
Mark Crispin,
Raphael Finkel, and
Guy L. Steele Jr. Work on Adventure Woods discovered the
Colossal Cave Adventure game by accident on a SAIL computer in 1976. After contacting the original author by the (now antiquated) means of sending an e-mail to crowther@
sitename, where
sitename was every host listed on
ARPANET, he heard back from
William Crowther shortly afterward. Given the go-ahead, Woods proceeded to add enhancements to the
Adventure game, and then distributed it on the
Internet. It became very popular, especially with users of the
PDP-10. Woods stocked the Kentucky cave that Crowther had written with new magical items, creatures, and geographical features. Crowther's game, which originally featured few supernatural elements, was transformed into a loose fantasy world featuring elements from
role playing games. Woods can thus, in a sense, be considered one of the progenitors of the entire genre of computer
adventure games and
interactive fiction. By 1977 tapes of the game were common on the Digital user group
DECUS, and others (see
The Soul of a New Machine by
Tracy Kidder for a human history of this period). ==References==