[MUD-Dev] Online Worlds Timeline Update

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 21 February 2002, Raph Koster wrote:

> The name, "multi user dungeon" refers to a variant of ADVENT known as
> DUNGEN.

No, not ADVENT, ZORK.

ZORK was written in a language called MDL ("Method Definition
Language", 1975) which was all the rage at MIT's AI lab but which
wasn't used a great deal at institutions with punier computing
facilities. ZORK was ported to ForTran and renamed "Dungeon"
(ie. DUNGEN for a sixbit file name), for use on less computationally
endowed systems.

The TADS game list includes the following historical note about a
TADS conversion of DUNGEN:

  "The original 'Zork' as written in 1977-79 at the MIT by a group
  including Marc Blank and Dave Lebling.  It was programmed in MDL
  but ported to Fortran (and renamed 'Dungeon') by Bob Supnik in
  1979/80" (from
  http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/tads-gamelist2.txt)

The date looks a little wrong there, because MUD got its name in
1978 (either that or Roy's recollections as to the origins of the
name MUD don't match reality). I know that Marc Blank and David
Lebling were Zork's main authors, though, so I assume that Bob
Supnik did indeed do the conversion to ForTran.

		Richard

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