GoKawiilSolving the "Zork" mystery
It's been two years since my last Zork adventure and I finally got time to finish it. But before I restored my last save, I checked my blog notes and there was one "opened issue" which I wanted to address.
I glossed over problematic trivia about Zork which says, that "zork" was a jargon word for unfinished program in MIT Dynamic Modeling Group back in 70's. I also pointed out, that Wikipedia does not provide source to this information, to which one reader messaged me that I am wrong. And I was!
Source 1: Article "The History of Zork - First in a series" in The New Zork Times, from 1985. Tim Anderson says: We tended to name our programs with the word "zork" until they were ready to be installed on the system. Lebling and Blank, two other creators of the game are titled as a "Suspected Editor" and "Editorial Editor" respectively in this publication. Article "The History of Zork - First in a series" in The New Zork Times, from 1985. (Link)
For some reason I remembered that this information wasn't right. So I spent some time abusing the Wikipedia API and mining in edit history and I found that this information appeared for the first time in the 2001 edit without any source. It stayed like that until the October 2014 edit (13 years later!) when it got the source number 1 quoted above. Since then, there were 41 different edits, of which the most interesting one was December 2016 edit in which the information got 4 different sources of which 3 didn't say anything about "zork" being used for work in progress stuff, only as general nonsense word.
Source 15: Article "Masters of the Game" in The Boston Globe Magazine from May 1984. Marc Blank says: Actually, it's just a nonsense word. There are all kinds of words like that that hackers tend to use -- words like 'frob.' Frob means thingamajig, and it can be used as any part of speech. It's a generic noun and verb. Article "Masters of the Game" in The Boston Globe Magazine from May 1984. (Link)
Source 18: Article "History of the Zork" in special edition of IEEE Computer magazine from 1979. Authors of the game say: ...the [game] name was chosen because it was a widely used nonsense word, like "foobar". Article "History of the Zork" in special edition of IEEE Computer magazine from 1979. (Link)
Source 19: Infocoms publication "Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom" from 2000. (Link) directly quotes the interview from source 15. And then there is the Tim Andersons' version in source 1.
I did remembered this contradiction of sources 18 and 1, and lack of information from sources 15 and 19, and this time I wouldn't let it slide. I searched for other Zork related documents and found one more material not exactly in line with Tims' version.
...authors Marc Blank and Tim Anderson were at a complete loss in thinking up a good name for their new game. Since they wanted people to play it, and since you can't run a nameless program, they needed something quick. Blank chose Zork, a nonsense word commonly used at the MIT Lab for Computer Science as an all-purpose interjection. Article "A Zork By Any Other Name" in The New Zork Times Vol.3 No.1 1984 (Link)
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