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==History==
The original TADS 1 was released by [[High Energy Software]] as [[shareware]] in the late [[1980s]], and was followed by TADS 2 not long after. In the early [[1990s]], TADS established itself as the number one development tool for [[interactive fiction]], in place of simpler systems like AGT ([[Adventure Game Toolkit]]).
[[Graham Nelson]]'s [[Inform programming language|Inform]] has, since its release in [[1993]], slowly gained popularity and superseded TADS in the last half of the 1990s. Nevertheless, TADS 2 has been maintained and updated at regular intervals by its creator, [[Michael J. Roberts]], even after it became freeware in [[July 1996]]. Multimedia TADS, introduced in [[1998]], allows games to display graphics, animation and play sounds, if the platform supports it.
Recently, TADS received a major overhaul with the release of TADS 3, which is a complete rewrite of the TADS engine, only retaining the platform-dependent code to ease [[porting]]. TADS 3 has many new features, such as efficient dynamic objects (with [[garbage collection (computer science)|automatic garbage collection]]), structured [[Exception handling|exceptions]], native [[UTF-8]] strings, and many useful function classes.▼
▲TADS 3 has many new features, such as efficient dynamic objects (with [[garbage collection (computer science)|automatic garbage collection]]), structured [[Exception handling|exceptions]], native [[UTF-8]] strings, and many useful function classes.
According to the [http://www.tads.org official TADS website], as of [[August 2005]], the TADS 3 system is in its [[Development stage#Release candidate|release candidate]] stage[http://www.tads.org/t3dl.htm]. While TADS 3 is still subject to last-minute changes, and while its documentation is incomplete, the TADS 3 [[compiler]] and [[interpreter (computing)|interpreter]] are stable and they have been ported to the [[Unix]], [[Apple Macintosh|Macintosh]] and [[DOS]] [[platform (computing)|platforms]]. Several TADS 3 games have already appeared in the [[2002]], [[2003]], [[2004]], and [[2005]] [[Interactive Fiction Competition|IF Competitions]].
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