diff --git a/Zork-escape.md b/Zork-escape.md index aa0baa0..ad01d3b 100644 --- a/Zork-escape.md +++ b/Zork-escape.md @@ -21,3 +21,13 @@ Bob Supnik's story as told in his Get Lamp interview: > When I had this running in March of 78 I made contact with the guys at MIT and said, hey you know, it's possible to run this on a much smaller machine. Would you be interested in supporting this by actually giving me the complete source set as opposed to the fragment that I had. They came out to where I was working, and I was actually working right across the divide here in the other building. And they were completely astounded to see that what they regarded as a mainframe large scale program was running on this - from their point of view - tiny machine. They agreed to provide the full source set so that I could port as much of the game as existed at the time. So for really the first half of 78, I finished off an initial complete implementation and put that out in DECUS. Their one condition was that the big database file, the text file, that sort of had all the strings couldn't be published in unencrypted form. > > And then basically as new inputs came in - they finished the endgame and so forth - I kept up with what they were doing for about the next eighteen months. + +Eric Swenson: + +> While an undergraduate at MIT between 1976 and 1980 I became introduced to Adventure and Dungeon (Zork) and spent many hours with both games. One might say I became obsessed with obtaining the maximum number of points possible in both of these games. With Zork, which was still being developed, this was a moving target, so I had to play over and over as few features were added to the game and as the "endgame" was added. I did succeed in my pursuit of all the points in both games. Once that goal was met, however, my obsession turned to seeing and getting the source code for both games. Adventure source was easy to obtain. Zork sources, on the other hand, were closely guarded by the four implementors (Tim Anderson, Marc Blanc, Dave Lebling, and Bruce Daniels). I knew the game was developed on the MIT-DM ITS system, scouring the file system didn't reveal where the sources were. I did find some XGP printout of one of the game source files and was able to confirm the machine (DM) and directory in which the sources were kept. But I had no luck listing that directory nor finding the files. +> +> I made it my mission to get hold of the Zork sources. I had guessed that some ITS patch was hiding the directory where the sources were kept, and some magic incantation was required to make the directory accessible. I'm not sure if, at the time, the sources were encrypted -- that might have come later. I spent countless hours disassembling ITS and looking for the hack. Eventually, I was able to successfully patch ITS and gain access to the files. I know I needed to work quickly at this point because each time you patched ITS, a message was written on the system console -- a DEC LA36 printing console, I believe. I also didn't know whether any alerts were provided to the Zork implementors and at the time I hacked in, at least Tim Anderson (TAA), and possibly others, were logged into DM and (ostensibly) working on Zork. So as soon as I was able to access the files, I started madly FTP'ing the them from MIT-DM to MIT-MULTICS. I figured that copying them to MIT-MC would be risky as anyone could locate the files there and delete them. Multics, on the other hand, provided a more secure place to store the contraband. +> +> In the middle of my FTP session, Tim Anderson (TAA) came into the room where I was furiously snarfing files. He declared to me that what I was doing was "most distateful". He made no attempt to stop me at the time, and there was little I could do but accept the chastisement. I did manage to get all the files copied, but I felt bad that I had been caught red-handed. I still don't know how Tim knew what I was doing -- hence my suspicion that the implementors were alerted to my intrusion. +> +> My "work" was not done, however, I still had to preserve my copy of the files, and for that, I created a Multics backup tape of the sources. That tape followed me everywhere for years -- usually sitting in an attic until my wife made me throw it out. Interestingly, I begrudgingly thew out that tape (and lots of other old artifacts) just prior to learning that Multics was in the process of being resurrected on the DPS8M emulator. Had I kept them a bit longer, I could have had the backup tape imaged and loaded onto a currently running emulated Multics system. I did, however, copy all the Zork sources back to MIT-MC prior to my leaving MIT (to work on Multics at the Pentagon). I wanted to get a nice, bound XGP copy of the sources. I did manage to get this printout and have the set to this day. I encrypted the sources and left them in an archive when I graduated. Of great surprise to me, I recently uncovered that archive in MIT-MC backup tape images and have loaded them onto an emulated ITS system. Of course, until we manage to get a working MDL interpreter, those files serve only informational and historical purposes. I do hold out hope, however, that we'll get an MDL interpreter working some day and will be able to run those sources. While I'm sure the game experience will be exactly the same as that gleamed from running the Dungeon that was ported to Fortran and C and freely available on the Internet, somehow, I'll get much more satisfaction if we can run MDL Zork on ITS some day. \ No newline at end of file