Oh man… {shudder} That’s a scary thought. Never mind trying to solve a puzzle, just coding the thing gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m writing this in Java (for a number of reasons, one of which is “to learn Java better” and the other of which is “I can make it run locally or online without much extra configuration”. That being said, though, this is a “completely from scratch” kind of thing. None of that silly reuse of code for me! Ha! No, I’m coding an entire shell by hand, complete with implementing all the usual function like listing files and moving directories!
I remember that somewhere around 1990 there was an IF shell for *nix. Where I worked we didn’t have it, but we did write a bunch of little shell scripts giving the same kind of feel. “look” would call “ls”, “inventory” would do an ls of .inventory in the home directory, “enter” would do “cd”, and “out” “cd …”. And “take” and “drop” would move stuff into and out of .inventory. Any directory could have a .room file, which would be printed upon enter or when looking, and a .flags file with flags such as “open” (meaning that the contents should be shown when looking at it), et cetera.
I had some programs that redirected Linux commands to their MS-DOS equivalents, and this also brings to mind the MS-DOS batch file text adventure games… also some IRC servers had “MUD” modes which are hazily being brought to memory… but all of these are woefully entirely tangential to your query.
Very cool! I was not even born during the command line era (though I think I do remember my father having DOS), but it seems fascinating to me now, probably in much the same way that Steampunk is a popular genre for movies and novels. I’m mostly lost in Telehack, but it’s definitely fun to play with. Thanks for telling us about it.