When I saw the headline"4 arrested in federal terror probe into Infocom", my first reaction was "they still exist?" followed by "how on earth could it be linked to terrorism?" Of course, the Infocom in this case is not the same Infocom I used to know. The company no longer exists, but its memory lives on the in nether realm of computer nerds who spent way too much time playing Infocom's games. By common acclaim, Infocom made the greatest adventures, with such legendary titles as the Zork series, Planetfall and also The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which they did in cooperation with Douglas Adams. What used to require the full capacity of a computer twenty years ago, you can now play online in your web-browser. To those who're used to the whizz-bang graphics and sound of modern games, the Infocom adventures are unlikely to be very captivating at first sight. But the level of immersion into the worlds Infocom created was very high nonetheless. What the computer could not show, you had to make up for with your imagination.

The goal of an adventure is to solve puzzles as you go along. You can type simple commands to the computer, such as "look" and "get toothbrush," or "lie in front of bulldozer." One of the classic puzzles in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was getting the Babel Fish into your ear... I can still remember how to do it. (I compensate for this by not being able to remember birthdays, anniversaries, holidays or anything that happened before my last nap.) Ah, those were the days...