Author Highlights: Graham Nelson

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

Nice.

A nitpick:

By reverse-engineering the Infocom format, Graham Nelson had managed to find a way

I don’t believe Graham was involved with the reverse-engineering work. That was done by an Internet group calling themselves the InfoTaskForce, in the late 1980s.

(The first version of the ITF interpreter was released in mid-1987, while Infocom was still active.)

Graham wrote, in 1997:

In the reverse direction, decipherment is mostly due to the InfoTaskForce (David Beazley, George Janczuk, Peter Lisle, Russell Hoare and Chris Tham), Matthias Pfaller, Mike Threepoint, Mark Howell, Paul David Doherty and Stefan Jokisch. Only a few of the pieces in the jigsaw were placed by myself.

Curses and Inform were written to work with the Z-machine interpreters that existed on the Internet at the time (ITF and ZIP). Later, Graham led an effort to create a formal Z-machine standards document. (Which is where he wrote the quote above.)