I had the honor of having my article "Write Your Own Computer Fantasy Simulation" published in the Jul/Aug-1980 issue of Recreational Computing . That wonderful magazine was published by the People's Computer Company -- a non-profit corporation then in Menlo Park, California.

To the best of my knowledge, the article contained the first published Computer Fantasy Simulation (CFS) written expressly for children. As with any CFS, obstacles and unfavorable situations had to be overcome. Unlike many, the creatures were all friendly and there was no violence; thus, planning, problem solving, and inventiveness were encouraged in a non-threatening atmosphere.

A more recent honor is that Geoff Draper completely rewrote the game in C++, giving it audio, video, and a modern point-and-click interface. His work is described at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7083 The first text adventure written specifically for children is now the first text adventure to be rewritten completely with a GUI. Like the old version, the new version is free software -- it is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. You can download Geoff's THIRSTY NELLAN at http://www.geocities.com/thirstynellan/. Please do.

If you have the patience for a two and a half minute download for a 56K modem, you can view the table of contents for that Jun/Jul 1980 issue of Recreational Computing.

The interaction with the 1980 program was in the tradition of Crowther and Woods classic Adventure; commands of experienced players were in verb-noun form (UNLOCK DOOR) although the program accepted intervening words (UNLOCK THE DOOR). There was no sophisticated parsing such as in Zork. The article was part of what was to be a three part series but, alas, Recreational Computing ceased publication before the third article was published.

The first CFS was "Nellan is Thirsty". The child would win if they could deliver the milk to Nellan the cat but it was a special challenge to deliver the milk while it was still cold.

The NELLAN program ran in a 16 k Triss One (a Tandy Radio Shack Model I with Level II BASIC and 16 kilobytes of RAM) but would not quite fit in the more popular 16 k Triss Three (because of an extra 258 bytes demanded by the Triss Three's). Many of my friends had the standard Triss Three which had 4 kilobytes of RAM -- not a misprint; I'm typing this on a machine with 192.0 megabytes of RAM -- forty-eight thousand times as much RAM.

The article was graced by art work, shown on the left, provided by Recreational Computing artists -- the program could not produce a graphic like this. This issue, however, had an article by Dennis Allison predicting that future CFSs would have sound, animated graphics, perhaps speech recognition, as well as more exotic features appealing to other senses.

A primitive bit of graphics did appear in the program. There was a magic map -- magic because it had the magic feature of updating itself as we explored; that is, a room appeared on the map if and only if we had visited that room. The program had graphics both for the Tandy Radio Shack and the Zenith/Heath computer -- when using computer system X you could comment out the graphics code (all contained in one place) for computer Y. The magic map feature was suggested by my colleague Craig Wood when we were both at University of Houston Victoria. (Craig is now at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, and I'm back home in Montgomery, Alabama, teaching at Auburn University Montgomery.)

The second version of the CFS program was CAKE and ran in the Jul/Aug-1981 issue of Recreational Computing . The CAKE program

• was easier to explain in one class meeting,
• had lines of code and interaction restricted to thirty-two characters across for easy display on a monitor, and
• fit in a Triss Three with 16 k of RAM -- provided the documentation was not keyed in.

In CAKE, the user/player/adventurer is to deliver the cake to the party room. It took my daughter's fourth grade class about twenty minutes to solve this CFS.

Although I used CFSs designed for children, the goal of the series was to make it easy for a person who knew some Microsoft BASIC to modify the program in order to construct their own CFS. (I say "the program" since the two CFSs published used essentially the same program with different data.)

For years I intended to rewrite DELIVER THE CAKE in a language more suitable for today -- perhaps Microworlds Logo or Python. As mentioned above, I am honored that Geoff Draper has given us THIRSTY NELLAN which is the old NELLAN IS THIRSTY with a modern face.

This Web page was constructed at the invitation of Dennis Allison to participate in a virtual reunion of those who were somehow involved with the People's Computer Company decades ago. In the reunion spirit, I hereby provide a link to my home page. I'd love to hear from you -- my e-mail address is fsmith@mail.aum.edu.