Comment by _sh

You might like 'How to Fit a Large Program Into a Small Machine' (http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/small.html), where some of the founders of Infocom talk about the approaches they used to fit Zork (which required a massive 1MB of memory) onto microcomputer systems which had 32K and a floppy disk drive.

See also the Digital Antiquarian's fascinating (and reasonably technical) blog on the origins of Infocom: http://www.filfre.net/tag/infocom/