A.ALDERSON@MACBETH.STANFORD.EDU (Rich Alderson) (08/04/87)
A quick dip into history: The game as it was written, in MDL (an elegant dialect of LISP which contributed ideas to Common Lisp), was known as ZORK. An alias was MADADV (Mad Adventure). It was originally written for the ITS operating system on PDP-10s (which became DECsystem-10s and DECSYSTEM-20s), which had a 6-character limit on filenames, so that DUNGEON wouldn't have been a possible name in any case. At some point, a DEC engineer translated the game to FORTRAN--but only the text, since the sources had not been available for years. That version was named Dungeon, and STILL was a PDP-10 program; in its FORTRAN form, it has been transported to other architectures such as System/370 and VAX. Some of the original authors, who had been students at MIT, were among the founders of Infocom; oddly enough, their first products were expansions of various parts of the original Zork. (Zork II is mostly new material; Zork III's end game was the original end game for mainframe Zork.) More than you ever wanted to know... Rich Alderson A.Alderson@Macbeth.Stanford.EDU -------