“The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,”

Zork is how and why I got on the ARPANET as a nerdy kid. And I wasn't even a Russian Spy! [1]

Connecting to the ARPANET and getting an account on DM was an adventure in itself, almost like the beginning of the game itself.

At the time there were no passwords or anything but security through obscurity on the ARPANET TIPs. And the MIT-AI Lab was kind enough to hand out free after-work-hours "TURIST Accounts" [2] to anyone who asked nicely with the right magic words.

Some dude named Bruce who had a BBS (Bruce's NorthStar Horizon in Northern Virginia) told me how to do it step by step:

1) After 8PM EST, dial up the NBS TIP at (301) 948 3850 [3] at 300 baud, typed "E" to get the banner, then "@L 134" to connect to AI. (NCP host ids were only 8 bits, before TCP/IP's vast 32 bit address space!)

2) Make up an account name (I chose A2DEH).

3) Try to log in with that name, like ":LOGIN A2DEH".

4) If it asks for a password, somebody already has that account. In that case, think of another name and try again. (RMS's password was famously "RMS", after they forced everyone to use a password over his objections).

5) If it doesn't recognize your user name, it asks "Do you want to apply for an account?" Answer YES. When it asks "Why do you want to use the MIT-AI Lab's PDP-10?" answer "Learning LISP." (Which, as it turns out, is a long incremental process pursued over a lifetime, since there are so many implementations of LISP on the inside with names like MDL and JavaScript on the outside.)

6) When the account is approved, now all ITS systems know about you (ITS had network file and account sharing long before NFS and YP), and although you still can't log into DM directly, you could log into AI to learn LISP (and EMACS).

7) The MIT-AI Lab staff would kindly and patiently go out of their way to help you learn LISP and EMACS. (Many thanks to KMP for writing TEACH-LISP and answering my clueless tasteless questions like "how to you set the value of a variable?").

8) To play Zork, dial up the TIP after 8PM and connect to DM with "@L 70".

9) Log in as "URANUS" with password "RINGS".

10) So as not to look suspicious (3 kids from all over the country [4] logged in as URANUS, URANU0, URANU1 at the same time all playing Zork or watching each other play), change your user name to your own with ":CHUNAME A2DEH".

11) Only two people could play ZORK at once, so hang out chatting with other people waiting to play ZORK, or spying (in a socially acceptable manner) on whoever's playing ZORK via ":OS PDL" (for "Output Spy Paul David Lebling"), or snooping around trying to find the Zork source code [5], which was well hidden.

12) There was no file security, so you could snoop around Marvin Minsky's home directory and hurt your brain trying to understand what appears to be line noise, but is actually the Universal Turing Machine he implemented in TECO. [6]

13) When somebody from USER-ACCOUNTS sends you a "nice private message" telling your they know what you're up to with ZORK, and that you should really learn LISP like you said you would because it's such a great language, instead of demanding you commit "seppuku" and "dumping you off the net and be done with it", you simply start learning LISP instead of acting like an entitled dick [7] by whining about how the people who gave you a free account that you bragged about in BYTE magazine are a bunch of communists and threatening to get some Proxmire type to start inquiring into its operations by seeing if your "Pentagon friends can upset them. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0

[2] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html

[3] https://www.saildart.org/TIPS[P,DOC]3

[4] https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths

[5] https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918

[7] http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html