Don Woods (programmer)

Woods teamed with James M. Lyon while both were attending Princeton in 1972 to produce the unprecedented, excursive INTERCAL programming language.

He also co-authored "The Hacker's Dictionary" with Mark Crispin, Raphael Finkel, and Guy L. Steele Jr.[1] Woods discovered the Colossal Cave Adventure game by accident on a SAIL computer in 1976.

Woods stocked the Kentucky cave that Crowther had written with new magical items, creatures, and geographical features.

[2] 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).