This is highlighted by the "Best Paper" awards he has received from top publication venues such as ACM SIGMETRICS and IEEE INFOCOM.
It was named after a fictional character from the Planetfall game by Infocom.
Several important programming languages and systems were developed on ITS, including MacLisp (the precursor of Zetalisp and Common Lisp), Microplanner (implemented in MacLisp), MDL (which became the basis of Infocom's programming environment), and Scheme.
:The large emerald is also one of the Twenty Treasures of Zork from the Infocom text adventure Zork I.
He collaborated with Douglas Adams on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Bureaucracy and the never-completed Milliways: The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe for Infocom, and with Georgina Sinclair on Jinxter for Magnetic Scrolls.
In the 1980s he worked for Infocom as a programmer, first on a Zork interpreter for the Commodore 64, and later on the ill-fated Cornerstone database product.
In the Infocom interactive fiction adventure, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the hero (or heroine, depending on player choice) was from Upper Sandusky, Ohio and the first scene of the adventure game took place in a bar in the town.
In sharp contrast to Douglas Adams' close work with Steve Meretzky on Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, James Clavell contributed little to the design of the game, although he and Dave Lebling met several times.
("Frob" is a word in MIT slang, and appears as a prefix for invented words throughout many of Infocom's works. Here it is most likely playing on 'Penzance Cove', the backdrop of the famous comic opera Pirates of Penzance.)
Steve Meretzky, an Infocom interactive fiction author, chose the setting of Upper Sandusky at random and did not intend the town to be reflected in any particular light.
Craig Shaw Gardner novelized Wishbringer in the Infocom Book line.
Previous games by Infocom used a parser evolved from the one in Zork I, but for Zork Zero, they designed a new LALR parser from scratch.
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground (or ZUU for short) is an interactive fiction video game written by former Infocom Implementors Marc Blank and Michael Berlyn and implemented by G. Kevin Wilson using the Inform language.