Johnny Billquist wrote:
If ZORK were ever to run on any other machine
that machine first and foremost would have to
have MDL. You know if SDS had that?
A quick scan of my MDL manuals:
"The MDL Programming Language" by Galley & Pfister
and
"The MDL Programming Environment" by Lebling
(both published by Laboratory for Computer Science @ MIT)
show that MDL only ran on ITS, Tenex, and TOPS-20.
SDS, on the other hand, ran the CP-V operating system.
So I suppose that Zork never did make it onto an SDS machine.
I do, however, clearly remember an SDS machine on the 9th floor at 545 Tech
Sq. during my tour back in the early 80s. I was a youngin' though, and was
just in heaven being so close to all these cool machines which I had only
been accessing through a TIP from across the country (via the RAND-TIP in
Los Angeles). Furthermore, I only had access to a printing terminal back
home (300 baud, thermal paper, acoustic (loose fitting, noisy) coupler) --
so once I was given the tour, and then a seat at a CRT with a 9600 baud
connection, well, I don't think I slept for 48 hours...
Those were the days... only taking a break at sunrise for a food run with
some of the other all-nighters hanging out there.
Eventually, the folks at RAND caught up with my (non-authorized) usage --
and politely asked my to cease accessing the TIP. This was my first
experience of going through a "withdrawal" syndrome -- I practically lived
on those MIT machines (via their Tourist accounts they gave out.)
-Eric F.