which David Ahl wrote to help promote DEC's minicomputers which I saw a lot of as a kid because I grew up in New Hampshire right next to DEC's headquarters in Massachusetts and DEC donated numerous machines to schools. Before my high school got a VAX (a 32-bit machine a lot like the 386) it had a PDP-8 which had a printing terminal and two video terminals and I think 24K 12-bit words. It could support three sessions running BASIC or boot up in a one session mode and run
Some schools had much nicer PDP-11 machines which had 8-bit words and could give each user a 64-bit address space so the BASIC experience was a lot like a top-of-the-line home computer. Dave Ahl saw micros were the future so he started Creative Computing magazine and came out with this sequel in 1980
I had a TRS-80 Color Computer back then which was pretty unusual and my take was that most games from those books were pretty portable and you could usually get them working on any micro of the day with simple modifications if any.
Now those text adventures were a special case, there is the issue of (1) not wanting to reveal the text, but also the fact that (2) is is cumbersome to express that kind of behavior in basic, and (3) the programs get very big. Text adventures of the 1980s were usually written in a specialized object-based interpreter. The most famous was infocom's z-machine
developed his own interpreter that was simpler but more specialized than the Z-machine. Scott developed a BASIC version of his interpreter which you could type in, and also developed assembler versions of the interpreter for many machines like the black&white TRS-80, Apple ][, etc.
Both the ZIL machine and the Scott Adams Interpreter had compilers which would turn human-readable code into a binary file that the interpreter would play.
For what it is worth, there is an electronics teaching lab at Phillips Hall at Cornell University named after David Ahl that I often walk past on the way home from work.
