Question about Dungeon game on the PDP 32

Sigh!

(I've just downloaded zorkos2.zip from Hobbes so as to demonstrate this)

G:-temp-Zork-bindungeon Welcome to Dungeon. This version created 11-MAR-91. You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. Opening the mailbox reveals: A leaflet. Welcome to Dungeon! Dungeon is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortal man. Hardened adventurers have run screaming from the terrors contained within. In Dungeon, the intrepid explorer delves into the forgotten secrets of a lost labyrinth deep in the bowels of the earth, searching for vast treasures long hidden from prying eyes, treasures guarded by fearsome monsters and diabolical traps! No DECsystem should be without one! Dungeon was created at the Programming Technology Division of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling. It was inspired by the Adventure game of Crowther and Woods, and the Dungeons and Dragons game of Gygax and Arneson. The original version was written in MDL (alias MUDDLE) The current version was translated from MDL into FORTRAN IV by a somewhat paranoid DEC engineer who prefers to remain anonymous, and was later translated to C. and later:

You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A pbuttage leads to the west, and a dark staircase can be seen leading upward. To the east is a small window which is open. On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers. A clear glbutt bottle is here. The glbutt bottle contains: A quanbreasty of water. You are in the living room. There is a door to the east. To the west is a wooden door with strange gothic lettering, which appears to be nailed shut. In the center of the room is a large oriental rug. There is a trophy case here. On hooks above the mantlepiece hangs an elvish sword of great antiquity. A battery-powered brbutt lantern is on the trophy case. There is an issue of US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT dated 11-MAR-91 here. Taken. US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT 11-MAR-91 Late Dungeon Edition --- LATE NEWS FLASH!! --- The endgame is here! (Somewhere) There have been some puzzling new discoveries near the Thief's hideaway. --- BACKGROUND INFORMATION ---

reimplemented in FORTRAN-IV from the original MDL sources created at MIT. The parser in this version is somewhat simpler than the parser in the ARPAnet version; within this limit, this version is fully congruent with the current version on the ARPAnet. This version has been converted from FORTRAN-IV to C via f77. If you have any problems, please report them to:

Now all that (apart from the translation to C) is as I remember it from a decade earlier, on the VAX.

-- "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." Blaise Pascal,Lettres Provinciales-, 1657