Okay, I give up. What is the real story?

[Nelson Bolyard]

In article <1990Nov11.040756.27552 at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> 
xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
>By the way, Adventure is also the source of the line "you are in a maze of
>twisty little passages, all alike", in case that one also had you confused.
>
In the adventure game, any attempt to take something that was not in the
same cave room (e.g. a stick) would generate error messages like:
	"I see no stick here."
	"I see no bird here."
	"I see no dragon here."

Five years ago, it was not uncommon to hear computer users utter the phrase
"I see no <whatever> here."  

Another magic transport word, like xyzzy, was "plugh" (which I always
pronounced "ploog", but I also heard pronounced "ploo" "ploof" "plooj" 
"pluf" and "plug") which took you from the well room to somewhere (I forget).

Other Adventure phrases:
	"You are at <roomname>."
		This message was generated when you entered a room you've
		been in before.

	"With what, your bare hands?"
		This was the reponse to the command "kill dragon".
		The correct answer was "yes".

	"You can't get there from here."
		This message occurred when you had gone thru a one-way
		passage and tried to go back.

	"Your batteries are getting weak."
	"There's a vending machine around here somewhere."
	"You are now in complete darkness.  
	 If you proceed, you are likely to fall into a pit."
	"You are at Witt's End.  Passages lead off in ALL directions."
	"There is a copy of Spelunker's Gazzette here."
	"You can't, it's written in dwarvish."

I once worked on a computer system that had been changed to generate
adventure responses to frequent commands, e.g.

pwd  would reply  "You are at /foo."

rm foo (where foo doesn't exist) would respond "I see no foo here."

rm foo (when you didn't have permission to remove the file) replied:
	"With what, your bare hands?"

cd /foo (when /foo was non-existant) replied: You can't get there from here.

It was fun for a while.
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Nelson Bolyard      nelson at sgi.COM      {decwrl,sun}!sgi!whizzer!nelson
Disclaimer: Views expressed herein do not represent the views of my employer.
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