In ninth grade in the town I grew up in, there were two junior high schools that traded off computers each semester. With a "newsletter" including printed programs.

The first text adventure I encountered was a future friend's multiple choice adventure, starting in a cave, called "The Cave".

With that as inspiration, began years of my own text adventures, from multiple-choice to broad grammars and vocabularies. "Command English" is what I called my grammar. The first starting at the entrance of a cave. Later versions, almost always involving caves. And mazes.

In high school I worked on a massive adventure called "The Wanderer", with all of my innovations. With an important cave that had to be rapelled down to from a cliff edge. Until the day I was working on it after school, and saved my latest version to disk before going home. At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.

My enthusiasm for creating adventures suffered a fatal blow.

> At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.

Wow, that sucks!

When I was a kid, I had an 8k Commodore PET. I wrote a text adventure game for it, but I ran out of RAM after implementing the parser, inventory, and three rooms.

Well, it worked, but there wasn't much to do, other than follow the Wumpus around....

I wonder if your friend's text adventure was itself inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, the very first popular text adventure game.

that's terrible, a low level read would've recovered it. I hope the story ended up well for you anyway