<!--
	Book Title: The Computer Entrepreneurs
	Book Subtitle: Who's Making it Big and How in America's Upstart Industry
	Authors: Robert Levering, Michael Katz, and Milton Moskowitz
	Publisher: New American Library, New York and Scarborough, Ontario
	Date: 1984
	Transcription by Steve Derby
	Excerpt: Chapter 2: Software Wizards, Joel Berez, pp. 120-126
-->

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This is an excerpt from:

Levering, Robert, et al. <em>The Computer Entrepreneurs: Who's Making it Big
	and How in America's Upstart Industry</em>. New American Library, 1984,
	pp 120-26.

---

<h1 style="border-bottom: 6px solid; margin-bottom: 1em;">Joel Berez</h1>

<img class="float-left-half" style="border: 1px solid; border-bottom: 8px solid;" src="/public/img/articles/computer-entrepreneurs-joel-berez/berez-cartoon.png" alt="A cartoon portrait of Joel Berez">

<blockquote style="font-style: italic; font-size: 2em; ">"It's clearly the most complicated, convoluted,
	disgusing piece of code that's ever been written"</blockquote>

<div class="clear-float"></div>

<div style="text-indent: -3em; margin-left: 3em;">

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Best-Known Venture:</span>
	Infocom

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Born:</span>
	1954

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Raised:</span>
	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Father's Occupation:</span>
	President of Action Industries (plastic houseware and giftware marketing business)

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">First Dollar Earned:</span>
	Working for his father's business

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Schooling:</span>
	B.S., electrical engineering and computer science, and M.B.A., Massachusetts
	Institute of Technology

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Original Financing:</span>
	Founding partners contributed $200,000 from savings

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Personal Net Worth:</span>
	10 to 15 percent of Infocom

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Home:</span>
	Waltham, Massachusetts

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Family:</span>
	Single

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Personal Transportation:</span>
	Saab

</div>

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<img style="max-width: 75%;" src="/public/img/articles/computer-entrepreneurs-joel-berez/infocom-logo.png" alt="Infocom logo">

<div style="text-indent: -3em; margin-left: 3em;">

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Infocom Inc.:</span>
	Creators of the best-selling piece of home entertainment software ever written,
	plus a dozen other interactive fiction games.

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Best-Known Product:</span>
	The *Zork* trilogy

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Year Founded:</span>
	1979

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Employees:</span>
	50

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Headquarters:</span>
	Cambridge, Massachusetts

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Sales:</span>
	$6 million (1983)

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Profits:</span>
	$526,000 (1983)

<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: bold;">Ownership:</span>
	Privately held by partners, employees, and friends

</div>

---

The story of Infocom could be told as a piece of Infocom
fiction: Once upon a time there was a strange galaxy
called MIT. In the galaxy was a nebula called the
Computer Science Lab, and in the nebula was a world-system
known as the Programming and Technology Division. It was a
long time ago, around the year 6 PCE (personal computer
era). The inhabitants of this world-system had learned to
travel through neuronic space on a mighty ship named the
Mainframe. One day the Mainframe carried them to a place
where they had never been before. It was called *Adventure*. It
was a game.

If this were really an Infocom game, it would get
interactive at this point. You would enter the nebula, find out all you
could about it, have hair-raising skirmishes with creatures and
forces, and through your choices determine the course of the
story, which would have dozens of possible endings.

The Infocom story, since it actually happened, is less
flexible (though not unwhimsical). When the MIT computer
whizzes discovered *Adventure* in the circuitous guts of their
mainframe in 1976, they were enchanted. That trailblazing
game, created by a pair of earlier MIT graduates, offered a
fantasy world with which the player could interact through simple
verb-noun commands like "Take sword." But soon the young
researchers felt a competitive itch. They knew they could create
a game with many more complex options and a far more
sophisticated text.

Three of them — Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, and Tim
Anderson — started working nights on what was to become a cult:
*Zork I*, which they initially set loose on the mainframe network
in 1977, and which is now the first part of a *Zork* trilogy. Blank
made up the nonsense name. With the help of MDL
(pronounced Muddle), a powerful programming language
previously developed at the lab by Blank and Anderson, *Zork* was
several giant steps ahead of *Adventure*.

With *Zork*, you can type in a command like this: "Pick up
the troll-wand and the rubber gerbil and give them to the Bog
Monster. Then follow the magic chicken." When you find
yourself facing the evil, axe-wielding troll in a gory grotto and
decide to defend yourself by throwing a sack at him, you might
get this shocking news: "The troll, who is remarkably
coordinated, catches the brown sack and, not having the most
discriminating taste, gleefully eats it. The flat of the troll's axe hits
you on the head. I'm afraid you are dead."

Other members of the MIT programming research group
were Joel Berez, Stuart Galley, Scott Cutler, and several others
who would later become part of the Infocom inner circle.
Credit for actually materializing the company goes to Albert
Vezza, who was then the chief of their research group. He had
long cherished the idea of channeling some of the talent at the
lab into a commercial venture, and in 1979, Vezza brought
together nine of the men who had worked with him at the lab
a few years before.

Joel Berez was in Pittsburgh, where he was working for
his father's company, Action Industries, and planning to go on
to business school. Marc Blank had just finished medical
school and was beginning an internship in Pittsburgh. When
Vezza's invitation came to join him in Boston for the formation
of Infocom, Berez quickly decided to attend MIT's Sloan
School of Management, and Blank dropped his two-week-old
internship in order to go back to Massachusetts. Infocom was
founded in June 1979, and Berez soon became its president and
company spokesman.

Blank and Berez had been getting together for dinners
when they were both in Pittsburgh. One of their favorite topics
was *Zork*, which by then was quite a popular item among
mainframe programmers. As Berez remembers it, they were at the
Grand Conqueror restaurant, spooning up fish chowder, when
a bright idea passed between them: Why not try to rewrite *Zork*
for a personal computer and market it?

It was obvious why not. The program was immense, taking
up a million characters of storage space on the mainframe; a
floppy disk for a personal computer held about 100,000. But,
in the next few days, both men became captivated by the idea,
and they had the feeling they could do it. "It involved writing
several new computer languages, a compiler, an assembler,
and interpreters to run a lot of the machines," Berez told us,
"but we thought it really was possible."

It was. They finished *Zork* in 1980, after recruiting former
MIT comrades Michael Dornbrook, Stuart Galley, and Steve
Meretsky as testers. A fledgling company called Personal
Software took over the marketing and *Zork* quickly became a
best-seller. Then, with the phenomenal success of its financial
program, *VisiCalc*, Personal Software changed its name to Visi-Corp
and divested itself of products that seemed to be beneath
its newfound dignity. Naturally the grotto-and-monsters game
had to go.

This was 1981, the year Berez graduated from MIT's
business school and became Infocom's first full-time employee.
Soon Blank also signed on full time, *Zork II* was released, and
*Deadline*, their first mystery, was under development. In early
1982, sales trailed off, but when *Deadline* appeared in March,
the charts soared and they've been soaring ever since. Sales in
1983 were $6 million, an increase of about 300 percent over
1982.

A *New York Times Book Review* writer described *Deadline* as
"more like a genre of fiction than a game," declared that the
narrative forms favored by Infocom have "archetypal power,"
and compared the *Zork* adventure to the Odyssey.

Most successful computer-related companies have a
single star, or at most, two co-stars. Infocom is different. When
newspapers and magazines write about the company, they
favor group pictures: Berez, Blank, and Vezza; writers Galley,
Meretsky, Lebling, and Michael Berlyn; Blank, Berez, and
Dornbrook. They all have interesting stories. Berlyn, for
instance, is the only non-MIT man in the leadership group.
He was a recognized science fiction writer and head of a
Colorado company called Sentient Software when he got hooked on
*Zork I*. "I need more *Zork!*" he cried out, but there was no more.
So he went to Boston and joined the group writing Infocom
fiction, combining his skills as novelist and programmer. And
when computer lab alumni Michael Dornbrook went to
business school in Chicago, he initiated ZUG, the *Zork* Users
Group, which he reckoned would take a few hours of his time
each week. But when membership reached 20,000, he found
himself obsessively producing maps, posters, T-shirt transfers,
and bumper stickers. In 1983, he joined the company's
management.

The fact that no single star outshines any other at Infocom
must be due, at least in part, to the group's genesis in the MIT
computer lab. The atmosphere of that lab — camaraderie,
humor, intense intellectual effort that is both individual and
collective — has carried over into the company. Ownership is
fairly evenly distributed, with a number of people holding 10
to 15 percent of the stock and all employees receive stock
options (which many have exercised).

Something else that has carried over is the emphasis on
creating "state-of-the-art development tools" before plunging
into specific applications. "If your tools are powerful enough,"
says Berez, "the applications drop out fairly easily." In the case
of Infocom's interactive fiction, this means inventing the
languages and codes needed to translate programs from the
mainframe to more than two dozen personal computers. It also
means developing and refining the parser — that special part
of the program which makes complex sentences and
interactions possible. Michael Berlyn says of Infocom's parser: "It's
clearly the most complicated, convoluted, disgusting piece of
code that's ever been written." Yet the company admits that its
parser is still primitive compared to those that will make way
for a truly sophisticated genre of interactive literature in the
future.

Infocom claims to be the only major software company
that writes its programs on a mainframe and then converts
them into languages that can be understood by personal
computers. To perform this esoteric act of translation, Marc Blanc
and Joel Berez created ZIL (Zork Interactive Language). A
rather idiosyncratic promotional story booklet called *Our
Circuits, Ourselves! — The Heroic Struggle of Micro-Americans to be Free*
likens this process to the dehydration of oats into oatmeal. A
kind, archetypal old Infocom steward explains to the timorous
hero, oatmeal company employee Delwood Bland, "Our Infokins
do the same thing — taking the vast amount of
information that goes into making up a world, then condensing it to a
floppy disk you can slip into your Micro-American, without
losing any of the 'goodness.'"

Infocom's mainframe is the DEC 2060, which a *Washington
Post* writer describes as "the biggest byte-bender in Digital
Equipment's fleet, compared to which your IBM PC is dumb
as a toaster." The 2060 costs $750,000; the company bought its
second one in mid-1984. With this machine, Infocom says its
programmers can do in three months what might take three
years on a personal computer.

But the makers of Floyd, Frobozz, and the cryogenically
preserved hero of *Suspended* aren't satisfied. While $6 million
may sound good by itself, it doesn't sound quite as good when
compared to the sales figures of leading business software
companies. The collapse of the arcade game industry in recent
years has given all personal computer game makers cause to
stop and reconsider; the Infocom team has lately been working
hard — and secretly — on business programs. According to the
*Wall Street Journal*, they will say only that they expect to produce
something "more sophisticated than current data base
managers." They also hint at the possibility of customizing the new
programs for individual industries, and of adapting their
games' conversational ability "to make business software less
daunting." Naturally, they express confidence that they can
make their way successfully into the already glutted business
market.

Here again, as the relatively stable past gives way to the
imaginary future, Infocom becomes a piece of fiction *in potentio*.
Many times the dauntless crew has rushed across the universe
in the mother ship Mainframe. Many times they have zipped
in and out of the great ship's ports in their small and sporty
micros. Long ago they left behind their home nebula, and now
once again they are venturing into dangerous, uncharted
worlds. There are scores of possible endings. Will there be a
crash? Or will the VisiWizard and the Lotus Enchanter soon
be trembling?

No one knows who writes the code for this story.