Source : Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
Advent \Ad`vent\, n. [L. adventus, fr. advenire, adventum: cf.
F. avent. See {Advene}.]
1. (Eccl.) The period including the four Sundays before
Christmas.
{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.
2. The first or the expected second coming of Christ.
3. Coming; any important arrival; approach.
Death's dreadful advent. --Young.
Expecting still his advent home. --Tennyson.
Source : WordNet®
advent
n 1: arrival that has been awaited (especially of something
momentous); "the advent of the computer" [syn: {coming}]
2: the season including the four Sundays preceding Christmas
3: (Christian theology) the reappearance of Jesus as judge for
the Last Judgment [syn: {Second Coming}, {Second Coming of
Christ}, {Second Advent}, {Parousia}]
Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing
ADVENT
/ad'vent/ The prototypical computer {Adventure} game,
first implemented by Will Crowther for a {CDC} computer
(probably the 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
{DEC20}s 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)