Wired carried this story about a collaborative environment for programming that is modeled on old-fashioned text adventure games – see Wired News: Coding Tool Is a Text Adventure.

If you want to relive those days of text adventures try Lobotomo Software’s port of Adventure to Mac OS X. Infocom have their Zork games available for free download for both PC and Mac (Classic) here too.

To get a feel for the significance of Adventure in the psyche of old-timer computer types have a read of The Soul of a New Machine from your local library and this on Adventure. Reading the Wikipedia entry Adventure game brought it all flooding back. Now when I close my eyes I see,

You’re in a maze of twisty thesis footnotes, all alike.
>north

You’re in a maze of twisty thesis footnotes, all alike.
>west

You’re in a maze of twisty thesis footnotes, all alike.
>south

You’re in a maze of twisty thesis footnotes, all alike.
>quit

Command not found
>