Grow: A Program the Learns
The GROW program itself seems to be the earliest example of a multi-player
user-extensible adventure game intended for teaching purposes. A similar
but more sophisticated system called lambdaMOO was developed nearly
ten years later at Xerox Parc. Note that MUD1 from Essex University
was multi-player but not user extensible nor intended for teaching
purposes. Although both GROW and the CHAOS time-sharing system are long
forgotten, the motivating need to teach computer literacy is as relevant
today as it was back then.
I have created this archive consisting of the executable script and
example data files needed to run the program. Much thanks goes to the
author Verda Spell of bwBASIC and to her grandson Ted Campbell for making
it widely available on the Internet. If anyone is still interested in a
readable and modifiable code challenge, my challenge would be to take
the above GROW program and rewrite it using best practices in modern
software engineering.
Last Updated: Tue Oct 11 02:01:00 PM PDT 2022