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Updated Zork escape (markdown)
@@ -22,6 +22,10 @@ Bob Supnik's story as told in his Get Lamp interview:
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> 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.
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Some more details have been published in the New Zork Times:
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> Although people could get runnable Zorks, they couldn’t get sources. We tried two approaches to protecting the sources (remember, there was no protection of any sort on DM): they were normally kept encrypted; and we patched the system to protect the directory where we kept the sources (named CFS, for either “Charles F. Stanley” or “Computer Fantasy and Simulation”). This worked pretty well, but was finally beaten by a system hacker from Digital: using some archaic ITS documentation (there’s never been any other kind), he was able to figure out how to modify the running operating system. Being clever, he was also able to figure out how our patch to protect the source directory worked. Then it was just a matter of decrypting the sources, but that was soon reduced to figuring out the key we’d used. Ted had no trouble getting machine time; he just found a new TOPS-20 machine that was undergoing final testing, and started a program that tried every key until it got something that looked like text. After less than a day of crunching, he had a readable copy of the source. We had to concede that anyone who’d go to that much trouble deserved it.
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Eric Swenson:
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> 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.
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