As Dave Lebling has said already, read before you post. The paper mentions that the original authors of Zork (Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Tim Anderson) wrote it for mainframes, and not as a commercial product. This is probably where you were playing it on PDP's.
It wasn't until Infocom was founded that Zork was released, and that was in June 1980 for the TRS-80 Model 1, not the IBM PC.
So, technically, Infocom didn't invent Zork, but Marc Blank was on Infocom's Board of Directors, and all three of the original mainframe authors were co-founders of the company. (This is where one would normally start discussing the metaphysical question of whether a company is something more than its employees, but I don't think that's necessary.)
Slashdot Mirror
As Dave Lebling has said already, read before you post. The paper mentions that the original authors of Zork (Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Tim Anderson) wrote it for mainframes, and not as a commercial product. This is probably where you were playing it on PDP's.
It wasn't until Infocom was founded that Zork was released, and that was in June 1980 for the TRS-80 Model 1, not the IBM PC.
So, technically, Infocom didn't invent Zork, but Marc Blank was on Infocom's Board of Directors, and all three of the original mainframe authors were co-founders of the company. (This is where one would normally start discussing the metaphysical question of whether a company is something more than its employees, but I don't think that's necessary.)