I also played this in its early days, and recently played it through in DOSBOX. The thing I've found is that, humour and text parser aside, these games really aren't that playable in 2017 because you follow this pattern.
Play for a bit. Look up solution to problem. Continue. Even if you swear you'll only use a walkthrough when you're really really stuck, you end up finishing the game in 45 minutes.
And it really made me really, we sank weeks into this, and never got past the first few screens in those days.
Playing games was different back then (for me at least). I would visit different places in the game as some kind of “virtual tourist” to explore and just enjoy myself. It’s not like there was anything else to do with a computer that wasn’t totally boring.
It was quite nice watching the vector backgrounds being drawn and filled in one polygon at a time too.
I had an instance a few years ago where I had to use an emergency/backup computer that I couldn't network in any way (very old laptop (AMD K6-2 :D) that only had a USB port, my modem's Wi-Fi was broken and I had no USB Ethernet adapters).
And... using that thing was really really nice. Getting data into it was enough of a small chore that it was remarkably focusing.
At one point, the only bootable CDs for i586 in the house were a couple old half-scratched Slackware discs. A lot of things refused to install, but sed did... um.
I can't remember why but I ended up reinstalling quite a bit (I think from "no I don't like this partition table layout") and so I wanted a simple package selector/installer. So I tried writing one using bash and way, way too many regular expressions. I started getting a (literal) headache after staring at screenfuls of modem line noise for about a week and had to give up. But I know how to left- and right-justify text using sed now (and I frequently use sed's full command set), which is kind of cool.
It's quite sad that our brains are so easy to distract with "and through this door we have A PURE STREAM OF ALL THE WORLD'S INFORMATION". It's sad because we live in a hyper-connected age, and yet we just can't mentally scale to cope with it.
Play for a bit. Look up solution to problem. Continue. Even if you swear you'll only use a walkthrough when you're really really stuck, you end up finishing the game in 45 minutes.
And it really made me really, we sank weeks into this, and never got past the first few screens in those days.