Nick Montfort’s blog, Post Position, has a superlative bit of detective work exploring the origins of the word “zork”, familiar to videogamers as the title of interactive fiction that famously begins west of a white house. It’s commonly known that the term was derived from programmer jargon at MIT for something unfinished. But what about before then? How did this word get into MIT’s computer labs in the 70s?

Mr. Montfort explores a number of theories, including the layout of Belgian typewriters and a character named Zork Arrgh in a 1969 science fiction novel. Hold on, I have to go see if that name is taken on my World of Warcraft server.

(Thanks Balance of Power!)

Read more from the original source:
Was Zork invented by a Belgian typewriter?

Tags: 1969-science, belgian, commonly-known, computer-labs, culture, famously-begins, jargon-at-mit, origins, word

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 6:31 pm and is filed under Extreme Games, Microsoft Research & Defense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.