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From: gern@AI.RL.AF.MIL (The Gern)
Subject: Re: Q: History of Interactive Fiction
Message-ID: <gern.43.748555759@AI.RL.AF.MIL>
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Organization: USAF/Rome Lab
References: <CD9q7F.Cx4@acsu.buffalo.edu> <CDB0K4.DvL@cbnews.cb.att.com> <AL.93Sep16142424@imdvlf.acuson.com>
Distribution: usa
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1993 20:09:19 GMT
Lines: 31

>   ...Dave Lebling.  Before it was scaled-down and became Zork, it ran 
>   on mainframes as DUNGEON.  (There was a great full-color Dungeon map 
>
>It was originally called zork, which was just a nonsense word that
>could be typed quickly.  At some point the name was changed to the
>more descriptive "dungeon", a horrible decision that was rectified
>when the game hit microcomputers.  I remember this from a Status Line
>"History of Zork" series.
>
>In 1985, I played dungeon on a BSD system, BSD 4.1 I guess.  I think
>this was the fortran version, presumably compiled with f77.  But the

The MDL original on the MIT ITS PDP-10s was called ZORK.  Only after a
DEC field engineer 'lifted' it and it was converted to FORTRAN (a wimpy 
parser resulted from this hack) was it renamed DUNGEON and was made
available in run-time object only from DECUS.  About 1979, a MULTICIAN at
Rome Air Development Center reverse compiled the TOPS20 DUNGEON binary
into MULTICS FORTRAN, this code was later altered to run on DEC VMS
FORTRAN, MS-DOS, and others. 

The DUNGEON that was available under BSD UNIX was a shell that ran the
PDP-11 run-time on the DEC VAX in PDP-11 CPU mode.    It was much later
that some thread of the FORTRAN code was converted into C.    


Cheers,
Gern
 

The world DOES revolve around Engineers - We chose the coordinate system!

