>It made you think about your program a lot more before you hit the keyboard.
And as I have ranted about it for a whole decade, This was pushed by Google / Facebook or Silicon Valley. Thinking long and hard before you hit the keyboard are wrong in modern software development.
The people at AtariSoft and Infocom were wizards in that regard. People today just lean on Electron or something similar.
Imagine releasing the same game, written in assembler, for Atari, Commodore, Intellivision, BBC, Apple, IBM, TI, TRS-80, and Coleco machines.
Infocom had it a little easier, as it only had to write parsers for each platform. But then, it also released its games for freaking PDP-11 machines at least into the end of the 80's.