Advent (from the Latin word adventus, meaning "coming") is a season of the Christian church, the period of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus, in other words, the period immediately before Christmas. It is the beginning of the Western Christian year and commences on Advent Sunday. The Eastern Churches begin the liturgical year on 1 September. The Eastern equivalent of Advent is called the Nativity Fast, and differs both in length and observance (see that article for specifics).

The progression of Advent may be marked with an Advent calendar reckoning Advent to start on 1 December, a practice introduced by German Lutherans. At least in the Roman Catholic calendar, Advent starts on the 4th Sunday before December 25; in other words, the Sunday between November 27 and December 3 inclusive.

Latin adventus is the translation of the Greek word parousia, commonly used in reference to the Second Coming. Christians believe that the season of Advent serves a dual reminder of the original waiting that was done by the Hebrews for the birth of their Messiah as well as the waiting that Christians today endure as they await the second coming of Christ.

Tradition

The theme of readings and teachings during Advent is often to prepare for the Second Coming while commemorating the First Coming of Christ at Christmas. With the view of directing the thoughts of Christians to the first coming of Jesus Christ as Saviour, and to his second coming as Judge, special lessons are prescribed for each of the four Sundays in Advent.

A darker purple (sometimes called "Royal Purple") is used whereas in Lent the color is often a reddish purple ("Roman Purple"). This shade is used for the hangings around the church, on the vestments of the clergy, and usually the Tabernacle. On the 3rd Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, rose pink is used, since this Sunday takes on a more joyous tone. In some Anglican and Lutheran churches, blue is the liturgical colour for Advent, a custom traced to the medieval Sarum Rite. This color is often referred to "Sarum blue." In the Eastern churches, red is used.

The "Late Advent Weekdays" or December 17-24, mark the singing of the Great Advent 'O Antiphons'. These are the antiphons for the Magnificat at Vespers, or Evening Prayer (in the Roman Catholic Church) and Evensong (in the Anglican Church) each day, and mark the forthcoming birth of the Messiah. They form the basis for each verse of the popular Advent hymn, "O come, O come, Emmanuel."

From the 4th century, the season was kept as a period of fasting as strict as that of Lent (commencing in some localities on 11 November; this being the feast day of St. Martin of Tours, the fast became known as "St. Martin's Fast," "St. Martin's Lent" or "the forty days of St. Martin"). The feast day was in many countries a time of frolic and heavy eating, since the 40-day fast began the next day. In the Anglican and Lutheran churches this fasting rule was later relaxed, with the Roman Catholic Church doing likewise later, but still keeping Advent as a season of penitence. In addition to fasting, dancing and similar festivities were forbidden.

In many countries, Advent was long marked by diverse popular observances, some of which still survive. In England, especially in the northern counties, there was a custom (now extinct) for poor women to carry around the "Advent images", two dolls dressed to represent Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary. A halfpenny was expected from every one to whom these were exhibited, and bad luck was thought to menace the household not visited by the doll-bearers before Christmas Eve at the latest.

In Normandy, farmers employed children under twelve to run through the fields and orchards armed with torches, setting fire to bundles of straw, and thus it is believed driving out such vermin as are likely to damage the crops. In Italy, among other Advent celebrations, is the entry into Rome in the last days of Advent of the Calabrian pifferari, or bagpipe players, who play before the shrines of Mary, the mother of Jesus, the Italian tradition being that the shepherds played these pipes when they came to the manger at Bethlehem to pay homage to the infant Jesus.

End of the liturgical year

In the Anglican Church, the Sunday before Advent is called Stir-up Sunday. In the Roman Catholic Church, the final Sunday of the liturgical year before Advent has been set as the Feast of Christ the King since 1969.

References

See also

• Fasting and abstinence in the Roman Catholic Church
• Mortification of the flesh in Christianity
• Lent
• Rogation Days
• Great Lent
• Apostles' Fast
• Dormition Fast

External links

• The Christian Season of Advent at the Christian Resource Institute
• Catholic Encyclopedia: Advent
• American Catholic: Advent to Epiphany Prayers, calendar and activities
• Liturgical Resources for Advent
• Advent FAQ at the Missouri Synod Lutheran web site
• Advent wreath FAQ at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America web site
• Advent Resources at The Bible Resource Center, an online ministry of the American Bible Society
• History of Advent

Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT, Colossal Cave, or Adventure) (Crowther, 1976; Crowther & Woods, 1977) was the first computer adventure game. It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and keen caver, who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. The Colossal Cave subnetwork has many entrances, one of which is known as Bedquilt. Crowther reproduced portions of the real cave so faithfully that cavers who have played the game can easily navigate through familiar sections in the Bedquilt region on their first visit.

History

Will Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, which developed the ARPANET (a forerunner of the Internet). Crowther was a caver, who applied his experience in Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky) to create a game that he could enjoy with his young daughters.

Crowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in the early 1970s, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created during the 1975-76 academic year and featuring fantasy elements such as an axe-throwing dwarf and a magic bridge.

The version that is best known today was the result of a collaboration with Don Woods, a graduate student who discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University and made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing. A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll.

Until the 2007-2008 academic year, students at Stanford University were required to re-implement the game as an assignment in the first computer programming course.

Technology

Crowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of Fortran code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10. (See the original source code) The program required about 60K words (nearly 300KB) of core memory in order to run, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128K words.

In 1977, Jim Gillogly of the RAND Corporation spent several weeks porting the code from Fortran to C under Unix, with the agreement of both Woods and Crowther.

The game was also ported to Prime Computer's super-mini running PRIMOS in the late 1970s, utilising Fortran 4, and to IBM mainframes running VM/CMS in late 1978, utilizing PL/1.

Later versions of the game moved away from general purpose programming languages such as C or Fortran, and were instead written for special interactive fiction engines, such as Infocom's Z-machine.

Later versions

Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released, mostly entitled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+, ...). Microsoft released a version of Adventure with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC (on a single sided disk, requiring 32KB of RAM). Russel Dalenberg's Adventure Family Tree page provides the best (though still incomplete) summary of different versions and their relationships.

Until Crowther's original version was found, the "definitive original" was generally considered to be the version that Don Woods expanded in 1977. As part of that expansion, Woods added a scoring system that went up to 350 points. Extended versions with extra puzzles go up to 1000 points or more. The AMP MUD had a multi-player Colossal Cave.

Dave Platt's influential 550 points version was innovative in a number of ways. It broke away from coding the game directly in a programming language such as Fortran or C. Instead, Platt developed A-code — a language for adventure programming — and wrote his extended version in that language. The A-code source was pre-processed by an F77 "munger" program, which translated A-code into a text database, and a tokenised pseudo-binary. These were then distributed together with a generic A-code F77 "executive", also written in F77, which effectively "ran" the tokenised pseudo-binary.

Platt's version was also notable for providing a randomised variety of responses when informing the player that, e.g., there was no exit in the nominated direction, for introducing a number of rare "cameo" events, and for committing some outrageous puns.

Memorable words and phrases

Xyzzy

"Xyzzy" is a magic word that teleports the player between two locations ("inside building" and the "debris room"). Entering the command from other locations produces the disappointing response "Nothing happens." As an in-joke, many later computer programs (not only games but also applications) include a hidden 'xyzzy' command -- the results of which range from the humorous to the straightforward.

Maze of twisty little passages

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" is a memorable line from the game, popular in hacker culture (where "passages" may be replaced with a different word, as the situation warrants).

The "all alike" maze was created by Crowther; Woods created a second maze, described as "all different" . In the "all different" maze, the player's current location is described in eleven different ways:

• Little maze of twisting passages
• Little maze of twisty passages
• Little twisty maze of passages
• Maze of little twisting passages
• Maze of little twisty passages
• Maze of twisting little passages
• Maze of twisty little passages
• Twisting little maze of passages
• Twisting maze of little passages
• Twisty little maze of passages
• Twisty maze of little passages

Don Woods was doing doctoral research in graph algorithms, and he designed this maze as (almost) a complete graph, with two exceptions important to game play. One potential name variation, "little twisting maze of passages", is not used.

Plugh

When the player first arrives at an area known as "Y2", the player receives the message A hollow voice says "plugh". The magic word takes the player between the rooms "inside building" and "Y2".

Other lines

Other memorable lines from the game are:

• Rubbing the electric lamp is not particularly rewarding. Anyway, nothing exciting happens.
• A huge green fierce snake bars the way!
• (When trying to kill the snake, a dragon, or such:) With what? Your bare hands?
• (When trying to kill the bear) With what? Your bare hands? Against his bear hands?
• (If you try to feed the bird:) It's not hungry (it's merely pinin' for the fjords). — a reference to Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch
• (If you hit the bear after feeding it:) The bear is confused. He only wants to be your friend.
• The game responds to a frustrated player's swearing with watch it! and to commands to eat inappropriate things (e.g., the bird, the snake) with Yecch!
• A sign at a stone bridge warns, "Stop, pay troll."

Continued development

Just as Don Woods picked up the development of Adventure where Crowther left off, other programmers continued the story in their own way.

Dave Platt

Dave Platt's 550-point version of Colossal Cave — perhaps the most famous variant of this game other than the original, itself a jumping-off point for many other versions including Michael Goetz's 581 point CP/M version — included a long extension on the other side of the Volcano View. Eventually, the player descends into a maze of catacombs and a "fake Y2". If the player says "plugh" here the player finds himself or herself transported to a "Precarious Chair" suspended in midair above the molten lava. (The 581-point version was on SIGM011 from the CP/M Users Group, 1984.)

Some games recognize "plugh" and will respond to it, usually by making a joke. The adventure game Prisoner 2 contained a cavern with the word "PLUGH" written on the wall; if the player typed this word into the command parser, he was sent back to his starting point.

Down the hall from Platt, three programmers were developing a debugger for a commercial operating system (CP6). They added a command to show a stack trace, and called the command “plugh”. The command passed all internal reviews for release until a technical writer refused to allow a funny word that didn’t mean anything to be included in the product. A lengthy development meeting determined that plugh stood for “Procedure List Used to Get Here”.

Dave Platt's's 550-point F77 version had some memorable moments as well:

• Into view there bounces a horrible creature!! Six feet across, it resembles a large blob of translucent white jelly; although it looks massive, it is bouncing lightly up and down as though it were as light as a feather. It is emitting a constant throbbing sound, and it >ROAR — this is a reference to Rover from The Prisoner

Platt also had a number of "cameos" — very rare random events of no consequence. For example:

• From the darkness nearby comes the sound of shuffling feet. As you turn towards the sound, a nine-foot cyclops ambles into the light of your lamp. The cyclops is dressed in a three-piece suit of worsted wool, and is wearing a black silk top-hat and cowboy boots and is carrying an ebony walking-stick. It catches sight of you and stops, seeming frozen in its tracks, with its bloodshot eye bulging in amazement and its fang-filled jaw drooping with shock. After staring at you in incredulous disbelief for a few moments, it reaches into the pocket of its vest and pulls out a small plastic bag filled with a leafy green substance, and examines it carefully. "It must be worth eighty pazools an ounce after all" mumbles the cyclops, who casts one final look at you, shudders, and staggers away out of sight.

Other versions

Other versions added their own flavour to the proceedings.

• With extreme difficulty, you take down from the wall a seven foot high, twenty foot long, three hundred and sixty degree view of Mars taken from the Viking lander. — from the Witt's End extension in Mike Goetz's CP/M version (1983); this action would summon Rover (see above)
• I am sorry, but magic rug flying regulations specifically prohibit any activity other than (a) enjoying the view (recommended), (b) reviewing one's possessions (optional) and (c) clutching rug edges in sheer stomach-churning terror (not recommended). — from Mike Arnautov's 770-point version (2003)
• A tiny elf runs straight at you, shouts "Phuce!", and disappears into the forest.

See also

• Interactive Fiction

References

External links

• Baf's Guide to the IF Archive with downloadable versions for many platforms.
• FORTRAN source code for Crowther and Woods collaboration
• Jerz, Dennis G. Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky. Digital Humanities Quarterly. The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. (2007). Retrieved on 2007-08-11..
• Crowther's original source code for Adventure (as recovered from Don Woods's student account at Stanford)
• Windows executable version of Crowther's original ADVENT
• iPod version of Colossal Cave Adventure
• Mac OS X version of Colossal Cave Adventure