COME WITH ME TO COLOSSAL CAVE. WHERE MAGIC ABOUNDS AND TREASURES ARE FOUND. BID YOUR FINGERS FOLLOW YOUR COMMANDS AND I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. YET BEWARE THE FIERY DRAGON, FOR HE KNOWS NOT WHETHER YOU ARE WIZARD OR SIMPLE CHARLATAN! HOW BEST TO CONQUER COLOSSAL CAVE? WITH DARING AND SKILL … OH CLEVER KNAVE! — Early 80s Adventure poster, from the CompuServe Incorporated Information Service Division
Adventure 751 has been, by my reckoning, the most sought-after variation of Crowther/Woods Adventure. It was generally available on the online portal CompuServe from nearly the beginning of the service and it disappeared when they shut down their games in the 90s. Arthur O’Dwyer started a web page in 2012 (with semi-regular updates!) dedicated to hunting down a copy.
To finish off a wild 2025 in game preservation, Arthur O’Dwyer announced the game has been found (by LanHawk, a regular amongst the comments here) and is playable.
In 1958, the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Arizona in Tucson received a donation of equipment in order to form an Analog Computer Laboratory. Analog computers deal with full electrical signals rather than 0s and 1s (think music on record vs. on computer). These could do particular computations (like differential equations) faster than digital devices of the time.
The University of Arizona’s lab was more cobbled-together than the for-sale-new device depicted above, as they made “two small but flexible computers complete with homemade removable patchboards” to start with but quite quickly changed mission to be a hybrid laboratory. By hybrid, I don’t mean just having digital and analog computers side-by-side, but trying to make computers that use both digital and analog components. Their name officially became The University of Arizona Analog/Hybrid Computer Laboratory. Designs included the “ASTRAC I”, a “iterative differential analyzer”, “APE 1”, a “teaching aid in statistics” that followed a similar design, and an “ASTRAC II” which was now “solid state” and “ultra-fast” and was supported by both the Air Force and NASA.
(Warning: My next three paragraphs consolidate three different accounts which differ somewhat.)
Three of the students in the 1969-1970 school year were Alexander B. Trevor, John Goltz and Jeff Wilkins. The trio were discussing the possibility of starting a time-sharing company. This was a little late to the game; Dartmouth with General Electric had developed the concept in the early 60s (where a large computer could have its time split into many parts allowing for multiple computers connected; including remote connections Dartmouth had thousands) and by the time Trevor, Goltz, and Wilkins came to the idea there were other companies like Tymshare and National CSS involved.
Jeff Wilkins’s father-in-law, Harry Gard, Sr., was a co-founder of Golden United Life Insurance; at the time the insurance company was still getting their computing via other companies, but Gard was keen on Golden United having a computer of their own. The original intent was to buy a mini-computer like the PDP-15 but Goltz (who was working with Wilkins and doing the purchase through DEC) got a call that he could have a KA-10 for just “a little more” (one of the PDP-10s, a full mainframe rather than minicomputer). While Goltz was an engineer and not a salesperson, John Goltz managed to persuade the board of Golden United to part with the money for the upgrade. This enabled the computer to more feasibly do time-sharing with many customers.
After graduating Wilkins moved to Columbus (followed by Goltz; Trevor was drafted to the Army so didn’t join them until ’71) to be at Golden United’s new spin-off, CompuServe; Wilkins at the age of 27 became President. Their first developed product was LIDIS (Life Insurance Data Information System); there were plenty of life insurance companies in Columbus to sell to.
The company had rapid success; by 1973 they moved to a new building, and by 1974 had not one but seven mainframes “and were using them not only to support a thriving time sharing business, but also to heat our office buildings.” CompuServe stayed with corporate clients, although Wilkins was alert to trends in personal computers; he hired his brother-in-law to track computer magazine news, given the fact most of the operations done by time-sharing could be done more easily with PCs.
... continue reading