The Enduring Legacy of Zork
“The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,”<p>Zork is how and why I got on the ARPANET as a nerdy kid. And I wasn&#x27;t even a Russian Spy! [1]<p>Connecting to the ARPANET and getting an account on DM was an adventure in itself, almost like the beginning of the game itself.<p>At the time there were no passwords or anything but security through obscurity on the ARPANET TIPs. And the MIT-AI Lab was kind enough to hand out free after-work-hours &quot;TURIST Accounts&quot; [2] to anyone who asked nicely with the right magic words.<p>Some dude named Bruce who had a BBS (Bruce&#x27;s NorthStar Horizon in Northern Virginia) told me how to do it step by step:<p>1) After 8PM EST, dial up the NBS TIP at (301) 948 3850 [3] at 300 baud, typed &quot;E&quot; to get the banner, then &quot;@L 134&quot; to connect to AI. (NCP host ids were only 8 bits, before TCP&#x2F;IP&#x27;s vast 32 bit address space!)<p>2) Make up an account name (I chose A2DEH).<p>3) Try to log in with that name, like &quot;:LOGIN A2DEH&quot;.<p>4) If it asks for a password, somebody already has that account. In that case, think of another name and try again. (RMS&#x27;s password was famously &quot;RMS&quot;, after they forced everyone to use a password over his objections).<p>5) If it doesn&#x27;t recognize your user name, it asks &quot;Do you want to apply for an account?&quot; Answer YES. When it asks &quot;Why do you want to use the MIT-AI Lab&#x27;s PDP-10?&quot; answer &quot;Learning LISP.&quot; (Which, as it turns out, is a long incremental process pursued over a lifetime, since there are so many implementations of LISP on the inside with names like MDL and JavaScript on the outside.)<p>6) When the account is approved, now all ITS systems know about you (ITS had network file and account sharing long before NFS and YP), and although you still can&#x27;t log into DM directly, you could log into AI to learn LISP (and EMACS).<p>7) The MIT-AI Lab staff would kindly and patiently go out of their way to help you learn LISP and EMACS. (Many thanks to KMP for writing TEACH-LISP and answering my clueless tasteless questions like &quot;how to you set the value of a variable?&quot;).<p>8) To play Zork, dial up the TIP after 8PM and connect to DM with &quot;@L 70&quot;.<p>9) Log in as &quot;URANUS&quot; with password &quot;RINGS&quot;.<p>10) So as not to look suspicious (3 kids from all over the country [4] logged in as URANUS, URANU0, URANU1 at the same time all playing Zork or watching each other play), change your user name to your own with &quot;:CHUNAME A2DEH&quot;.<p>11) Only two people could play ZORK at once, so hang out chatting with other people waiting to play ZORK, or spying (in a socially acceptable manner) on whoever&#x27;s playing ZORK via &quot;:OS PDL&quot; (for &quot;Output Spy Paul David Lebling&quot;), or snooping around trying to find the Zork source code [5], which was well hidden.<p>12) There was no file security, so you could snoop around Marvin Minsky&#x27;s home directory and hurt your brain trying to understand what appears to be line noise, but is actually the Universal Turing Machine he implemented in TECO. [6]<p>13) When somebody from USER-ACCOUNTS sends you a &quot;nice private message&quot; telling your they know what you&#x27;re up to with ZORK, and that you should really learn LISP like you said you would because it&#x27;s such a great language, instead of demanding you commit &quot;seppuku&quot; and &quot;dumping you off the net and be done with it&quot;, you simply start learning LISP instead of acting like an entitled dick [7] by whining about how the people who gave you a free account that you bragged about in BYTE magazine are a bunch of communists and threatening to get some Proxmire type to start inquiring into its operations by seeing if your &quot;Pentagon friends can upset them. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee.&quot;<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.art.net&#x2F;~hopkins&#x2F;Don&#x2F;text&#x2F;tourist-policy.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.art.net&#x2F;~hopkins&#x2F;Don&#x2F;text&#x2F;tourist-policy.html</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saildart.org&#x2F;TIPS[P,DOC]3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saildart.org&#x2F;TIPS[P,DOC]3</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;getlamp-rgriffiths" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;getlamp-rgriffiths</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;itafroma&#x2F;zork-mdl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;itafroma&#x2F;zork-mdl</a><p>[6] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13514918" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13514918</a><p>[7] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stormtiger.org&#x2F;bob&#x2F;humor&#x2F;pournell&#x2F;story.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stormtiger.org&#x2F;bob&#x2F;humor&#x2F;pournell&#x2F;story.html</a>