advent
from
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Advent \Ad`vent\, n. [L. adventus, fr. advenire, adventum: cf.
F. avent. See {Advene}.]
1. (Eccl.) The period including the four Sundays before
Christmas.
[1913 Webster]
{Advent Sunday} (Eccl.), the first Sunday in the season of
Advent, being always the nearest Sunday to the feast of
St. Andrew (Now. 30). --Shipley.
[1913 Webster]
2. The first or the expected second coming of Christ.
[1913 Webster]
3. Coming; any important arrival; approach.
[1913 Webster]
Death's dreadful advent. --Young.
[1913 Webster]
Expecting still his advent home. --Tennyson.
[1913 Webster]
from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
ADVENT
/ad'vent/, n.
The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will
Crowther on the {PDP-10} in the mid-1970s as an attempt at
computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented
game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Woods had been one of the
authors of {INTERCAL}.) Now better known as Adventure or Colossal Cave
Adventure, but the {TOPS-10} operating system permitted only
six-letter filenames in uppercase. See also {vadding}, {Zork}, and
{Infocom}.
Figure 1. Screen shot of the original ADVENT game
Orange River Chamber
You are in a splendid chamber thirty feet high. The walls are frozen rivers of
orange stone. An awkward canyon and a good passage exit from east and west
sidesof the chamber.
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
>drop rod
Dropped.
>take bird
You catch the bird in the wicker cage.
>take rod
Taken.
>w
At Top of Small Pit
At your feet is a small pit breathing traces of white mist. A west passage ends
here except for a small crack leading on.
Rough stone steps lead down the pit.
>down
In Hall of Mists
You are at one end of a vast hall stretching forward out of sight to the west.
There are openings to either side. Nearby, a wide stone staircase leads
downward. The hall is filled with wisps of white mist swaying to and fro almost
as if alive. A cold wind blows up the staircase. There is a passage at the top
of a dome behind you.
Rough stone steps lead up the dome.
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in
text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have
become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars the
way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a maze of
twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little maze of
twisty passages, all different." The `magic words' {xyzzy} and {plugh}
also derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth &
Flint Ridge cave system; it actually has a Colossal Cave and a
Bedquilt as in the game, and the Y2 that also turns up is cavers'
jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance.
ADVENT sources are available for FTP at
ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z. You
can also play it as a Java applet. There is a good page of resources
at the Colossal Cave Adventure Page.
from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
ADVENT
<games> /ad'vent/ The prototypical computer {Adventure} game,
first implemented by Will Crowther for a {CDC} computer
(probably the {CDC 6600}?) as an attempt at computer-refereed
fantasy gaming.
ADVENT was ported to the {PDP-10}, and expanded to the
350-point {Classic} puzzle-oriented version, by Don Woods of
the {Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory} (SAIL). The
game is now better known as Adventure, but the {TOPS-10}
{operating system} permitted only six-letter filenames. All
the versions since are based on the SAIL port.
David Long of the {University of Chicago} Graduate School of
Business Computing Facility (which had two of the four
{DEC20s} on campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s) was
responsible for expanding the cave in a number of ways, and
pushing the point count up to 500, then 501 points. Most of
his work was in the data files, but he made some changes to
the {parser} as well.
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style now expected
in text adventure games, and popularised several tag lines
that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green
fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun
X). "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."
"You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different."
The "magic words" {xyzzy} and {plugh} also derive from this
game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the
Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually *has* a
"Colossal Cave" and a "Bedquilt" as in the game, and the "Y2"
that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a
secondary entrance.
See also {vadding}.
[Was the original written in Fortran?]
[{Jargon File}]
(1996-04-01)
from
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
54 Moby Thesaurus words for "Advent":
Allhallowmas, Allhallows, Allhallowtide, Annunciation,
Annunciation Day, Ascension Day, Ash Wednesday, Candlemas,
Candlemas Day, Carnival, Christmas, Corpus Christi, Easter,
Easter Monday, Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday, Eastertide,
Ember days, Epiphany, Good Friday, Halloween, Hallowmas,
Holy Thursday, Holy Week, Lady Day, Lammas, Lammas Day, Lammastide,
Lent, Lententide, Mardi Gras, Martinmas, Maundy Thursday,
Michaelmas, Michaelmas Day, Michaelmastide, Palm Sunday,
Pancake Day, Passion Week, Pentecost, Quadragesima,
Quadragesima Sunday, Septuagesima, Shrove Tuesday, Trinity Sunday,
Twelfth-day, Twelfth-tide, Whit-Tuesday, White Sunday, Whitmonday,
Whitsun, Whitsunday, Whitsuntide, Whitweek
from
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
28 Moby Thesaurus words for "advent":
access, accession, accomplishment, achievement, advance, afflux,
affluxion, appearance, approach, approach of time, approaching,
appropinquation, approximation, appulse, arrival, attainment,
coming, coming near, coming toward, flowing toward, forthcoming,
imminence, nearing, nearness, oncoming, proximation, reaching,
time drawing on
grant@antiflux.org