Skip to content

TIMELINE.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
199 lines (166 loc) · 9.98 KB

TIMELINE.md

File metadata and controls

199 lines (166 loc) · 9.98 KB

Hack Development Timeline

Corrected Chronology

Primary source evidence from ;login: (Vol. 7, No. 3, June 1982) shows the code was already complete and submitted for the distribution tapes before the Summer 1982 USENIX conference took place.

Timeline

  • Fall 1980 — Rogue created for Unix by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman at UC Santa Cruz. Wichman: "It caught on immediately, like wildfire." (USENET, 1984-04-06)

  • Summer 1981 — Brian Harvey invites Lincoln-Sudbury students to California for a summer class he is teaching at San Francisco State University. During the trip, Jay Fenlason visits UC Berkeley and plays Rogue for the first time: "The summer between my sophomore and junior years, Brian [Harvey] invited some of us students to come out to California to [work as teacher's assistants during] a summer class he was teaching at San Francisco State University. While we were out there, we took a trip to UC Berkeley, where I got to play Rogue for the first time." He is immediately hooked: "I think I got a little bit obsessed then, and like any obsessed person who'd been cut off, I decided to build my own." (Craddock, pp. 92)

  • Summer 1981 — Jay Fenlason creates the earliest version of Hack in Logo (Turtle Graphics) on an Apple II. Once satisfied with the Logo prototype, he migrates the game to C on the PDP-11/70 at Lincoln-Sudbury. (Craddock, p. 94)

  • Fall/Winter 1981 — Fenlason develops Hack in C at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School — his "first semester programming project" (READ_Me). The development environment is a PDP-11/70 running V7 Unix (alpha test site for 2.9BSD), administered by a student-run Computer Center Users Society with ~50 members who have keys and unsupervised access. The game is an implementation of Rogue with 56 monster types (vs. Rogue's 26) and expanded dungeon features. Collaborators and their contributions:

    • Kenny Woodland (KW) — Maze-generating code for the bottom level, the original BUZZ() function, and "general random things" (READ_Me). Also contributed code for a game called Bombs. (Craddock, p. 94)
    • Mike Thome (MT) — Invented the chameleon, a monster that "could take on the appearance and abilities of other types of monsters" (Craddock, p. 94). Credited in READ_Me as "The original chamelian" [sic].
    • Jonathan Payne (JP) — The lock file system and "the massive CURS()" (READ_Me). Also the author of JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs). Payne and Fenlason had "a friendly rivalry going on as to whose program, JOVE or Hack, could update the screen most efficiently" (Craddock, p. 94). Both programs shipped on the same USENIX 82-1 tape.

  • First half of 1982 — Brian Harvey, Computer Director at Lincoln-Sudbury (1979-1982), submits student projects — including Hack and JOVE — for inclusion on the USENIX distribution tapes (82-1). Harvey, whose background was in the MIT and Stanford AI labs, had built the school's computing environment to resemble those labs: "a powerful computer system, with lots of software tools, an informal community spirit, and not much formal curriculum."

  • June 1982 — ;login: Vol. 7, No. 3 reports that the first 1982 USENIX distribution tape has been completed, noting the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School submission containing "quite a few games."

  • July 8, 1982 (Boston USENIX) — Michael C. Toy and Kenneth C. R. C. Arnold present "Rogue: Where It Has Been, Why It Was There, and Why It Shouldn't Have Been There in the First Place." The 82-1 distribution tapes — with Hack already on them — are distributed at the same conference.

  • ~1983/84 — Michiel Huisjes and Fred de Wilde at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam produce a PDP-11 version based on pre-1.0 Hack that Andries Brouwer later described (in an April 1985 Usenet reply) as copied from his directory without permission while 1.0 was still in development; he noted it was not in shape for distribution and lacked many features present in Hack 1.0.

  • Dec 17, 1984 — Andries Brouwer at Stichting Mathematisch Centrum (CWI), Amsterdam distributes Hack 1.0 to net.sources in 15 parts. Sender: play@mcvax.UUCP (funhouse). The announcement promised 10 parts but there were actually 15, all sent on the same day. Near-complete rewrite of Fenlason's code — Brouwer later wrote that 1.0.3 "contains very little if anything from the original sources."

  • ~Dec 1984 — net.games.hack newsgroup created by Gene Spafford due to the volume of Hack traffic on net.games and net.games.rogue.

  • Jan 1985 — Hack 1.0.1 patch adding a few features. Sender: play@turing.UUCP.

  • Feb 1985 — Hack for PDP-11 published on Usenet (net.sources) by Huisjes. Five shar parts.

  • Apr 1-14, 1985 — Hack 1.0.2 re-distributed as a fresh copy of the full source, spread over two weeks. Sender: aeb@mcvax.UUCP. The 1.0 distribution's single-day dump had overwhelmed many sites, and the 1.0.1 patch required the patch utility which was not universally available. Part 2 was famously missing from Google Groups until Ray Chason located it in 2005 in the DECUS library at vmsone.com/~decuslib/unixsig/uni87a/hack/.

  • May 1985 — PC/IX Hack published on Usenet (net.sources.games). Port of the PDP-11 version to IBM PC UNIX. Five shar parts.

  • Jul 23, 1985 — Hack 1.0.3 distributed as an ed script against 1.0.2. Last version distributed by Brouwer. Well preserved — copies found across the net.

  • Jul 28, 1987 — NetHack 1.3d released. Mike Stephenson, Izchak Miller, and Janet Walz fork Hack 1.0.3 and begin independent development.

Quest (Brouwer, undistributed)

Brouwer also wrote Quest, a game sharing most of Hack's source but using its own level generator (quest.mklev.c) that produced more interesting cave shapes instead of "boring rectangles." Quest was never officially distributed but leaked — a copy appeared at Vrije Universiteit, and it was listed among evidence seized in the 1990 Secret Service raids documented in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown. Brouwer's own copy was lost when an email transfer from Amsterdam to Denmark was silently discarded by a gateway for exceeding 100 KB.

Key Evidence

The ;login: evidence shows Hack was already submitted for the distribution tapes before the conference. Jay encountered Rogue during a trip to UC Berkeley while attending Harvey's summer class at SFSU — confirming his READ_Me acknowledgment: "This entire program would not have been possible without the SFSU Logo Workshop ... without whom I would never have seen Rogue." The Craddock interview further reveals that the earliest version of Hack was written in Logo (Turtle Graphics) for the Apple II before being ported to C, explaining the depth of Fenlason's gratitude to the Logo Workshop: it provided not just the encounter with Rogue but also the first development environment for Hack itself.

Licensing

Both original authors have issued BSD-type licenses allowing free redistribution and modification:

Jay Fenlason (covers all code he wrote):

It is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0), as specified by Jay Fenlason when the source was archived by the Snap!Hack project. A copy of the license is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

CWI (covers Brouwer's additions, formerly "Stichting Mathematisch Centrum"):

Copyright (c) 1985, Stichting Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Amsterdam — 3-clause BSD license

Statement issued by Dick Broekhuis, controller CWI.

Full license texts preserved in Brouwer's published account.

Primary Sources

  • David L. Craddock, Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games (Press Start Press, 2015) — Contains interview quotes from Jay Fenlason conducted via email in 2014. Pages 92 and 94 detail the origin of Hack: the encounter with Rogue at UC Berkeley, the Logo prototype on Apple II, and the contributions of each collaborator.
  • ;login: Vol. 7, No. 3 (June 1982) — USENIX distribution tape announcement
  • Jay Fenlason's Original_READ_ME (preserved in Brouwer's Hack 1.0)
  • Jay Fenlason's READ_Me (preserved in this repository at original/READ_Me)
  • Andries Brouwer's Hack history page
  • Brian Harvey, "Computer Hacking and Ethics" — A Case Study: The Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School (appendix to ACM Select Panel on Hacking position paper, 1985)
  • Neozeed, "While hunting for Hack 1.0 in usenet" (reproduces Brouwer's 1985 Usenet response about the PDP-11 version)
  • Usenet archives via SuperGlobalMegaCorp Altavista Archive
  • Glenn Wichman, "Rogue History: Information Desired" (posted 1984-04-06 to the USENET newsgroup net.sources.games)
  • Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, "Dyad: 1982" (yearbook that shows Jay Fenlason finished his junior year in 1982)

Lineage

Rogue (Fall 1980, Toy/Wichman)
  |
  v
Hack in Logo (Summer 1981, Apple II, Fenlason)
  |
  v
Fenlason Hack in C (Fall/Winter 1981, PDP-11/70, Lincoln-Sudbury)
  |
  +---> PDP-11 Hack (~1983, Huisjes & de Wilde, VU Amsterdam)
  |       |
  |       +---> PC/IX Hack (1985, IBM PC UNIX port)
  |
  +---> Hack 1.0 (Dec 1984, Brouwer, CWI Amsterdam)
  |       |
  |       +---> Hack 1.0.1 (Jan 1985)
  |       +---> Hack 1.0.2 (Apr 1985)
  |       +---> Hack 1.0.3 (Jul 1985)
  |               |
  |               +---> NetHack 1.3d (Jul 1987, Stephenson/Miller/Walz)
  |
  +---> Quest (Brouwer, undistributed — lost)