Solving the “Zork” Mystery (dpolakovic.space)
38 points by dpola 4 days ago
bandofthehawk 4 hours ago
General jargon like foobar is not that far off in meaning from "unfinished software". I think it's possible there's not really a contradiction between the different sources. The "unfinished software" meaning in the NYT article might have just been an example of one possible use of a more general nonsense word.
qsera 4 hours ago
Isn't it supposed to be fubar? fucked up beyond any recognition?
dahart 4 hours ago
Yes that’s the original spelling & meaning. But using the spellings foobar, foo, bar, and sometimes baz, have been used for decades in programming as examples, temporary names, stand-ins etc. I just assumed that spelling it foo was meant to distance it from the curse word slightly while simultaneously making the pronunciation more clear (i.e. foo not fuh); foo just makes a good nonsense word.
breatheoften an hour ago
atoav 4 hours ago
ChrisClark 4 hours ago
not in code, the tradition has been two words actually, foo and bar
Supermancho 3 hours ago
Note the Etymology of "Foo" RFC
layer8 21 minutes ago
Clearly “zork” is a mispronunciation of “source”. ;)
zabzonk 4 hours ago
Before I came across Zork, I thought I was quite intelligent...
eludwig 3 hours ago
To be fair, the earliest text adventures are brutally, brutally difficult and in many cases, very much unfair! There are nowhere near enough in-game indicators or foreshadowing of what might work in a certain context. Some solutions are obvious, but others are truly ridiculous and won’t realistically be solved without a walkthrough or “invisi-clue” book. All imo, of course.
Back in the 80’s we used to play these games in a group, with one person driving and a group of others helping out. Even then we used to fall back on hints occasionally.
ChicagoDave 3 hours ago
I played Dungeon, the much larger mainframe version of Zork in 1978. Between me and six other guys it took us nearly a year to finish the game.
At that time, there were no video terminals. There were no monitors (this is high school).
We played Dungeon and Adventure on 17” wide green bar paper terminals, usually a Digital Equipment Corporation DECWriter II or III.
There was no Internet. There was nowhere to go for hints. We simply had to figure everything out.
At that time, these were the first complex computer games. When the Imps created Infocom they made the top ten most popular games until video arrived in classrooms and homes.
There is a fairly active community of hobbyists that still make text games, though evolved away from the brutal puzzles to more balanced narrative and seamless puzzles.
Using Claude I even built my own platform: https://sharpee.net/.
There a thousands of free text games. Check out https://ifdb.org for more.
zabzonk 3 hours ago
bink 24 minutes ago
I had Claude code up a Slack bot so I could play any Z-machine game co-op with friends. We started up Zork 1, wandered the available map, made it to the cellar, walked north, and hit a room that was insta-death. We still haven't gotten back into it.
danaris an hour ago
> without a walkthrough or “invisi-clue” book.
Or exhaustive brute-force trial and error, which was much more expected to be standard back then.
dpola 4 days ago
I looked into the well known triva about name of most popular text adventure.
low_tech_love 4 days ago
Don’t want to be that guy but brace yourself for part 2… if the first one disappointed you in some places, the 2nd is going to beat you to a pulp. And I won’t even start on the third. I’m the kind of person who prefers not to finish a game than to read hints or walkthroughs, and parts 2 and 3 have been sitting on my unfinished stack for literally decades. :(