> 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....