Nick Montfort is a digital media scholar and poet who writes about interactive fiction, computational poetry, and retro platforms.
HN links it for computational poetry generators, the origin of the word 'Zork', and his history work; commenters recommend his book Racing the Beam.
Yeah, Inform, both Inform 6 and now Inform 7, is more or less the de-facto standard IF language. It's probably a decent place to start, and there is a ton of information available about it and libraries. Also, recently, a good book on it: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1435455061/
The main thing systems like Inform added over really old-style IF was more explicit modeling. An old-school way of doing things would be to write lots of chunks of text, parsers, code that causes things to happen, etc.; to the extent a world really exists, it's only because all the stuff you've thrown in is consistent with each other, the same way a world exists in a novel. Systems like Inform, instead, add an explicit declarative model of a world; there are objects with properties and locations, possible actions with preconditions and effects, containers and reachability, etc. A lot of the action and text is then attached to that model, and interactions and output are partly generated from it.
One thing still hardcoded in that model is style. The fact that a car is in the room with you and visible to you is explicitly modeled (not just buried in a canned snippet of text), but the style of how that's presented to you isn't explicitly modeled. Is it a matter-of-fact "There is a car here", some kind of dramatic gothic description, a vague offhand description, etc., etc.? The way to control that in standard IF is by attaching canned text snippets to different events. If you want style to change based on…
The old stuff is fun, but I've gotta recommend the newer efforts for really high quality text adventure. The current interactive fiction subculture is doing some pretty keen stuff, both novel and retro-flavored.
I think Emily Short's list of recommended IF (http://emshort.wordpress.com/how-to-play/reading-if/) is very good since it breaks up games by category. Nick Monfort also has some good recommendations (http://nickm.com/if/rec.html).
Personally, if you're looking for the old time feel, I would recommend:
Anchorhead (big, Cthulhoid, genuinely chilling in places): http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7
Christminster (puzzle-oriented, very tough): http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=fq26p07f48ckfror
Curses (puzzle-oriented, great setting, time travel): http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=plvzam05bmz3enh8
How to play these: http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/FAQ#How_can_I_download_and_play_IF.3F
Easy entry point: http://pr-if.org/play/
I recently read Racing the Beam (Monfort, Bogost), a survey of the defining technical details of the Atari 2600. I've read a number of gaming history books, and RtB was by far the most interesting. It might be better described as a hacker history of the platform, focusing on the limitations of the system and the hacks around them that caused Atari VCS games to have a personality distinct from its contemporaries. Also highly recommended.
[http://www.nickm.com/vcs/]
[http://www.platformstudies.com/]
I took a class [0] with Nick Montfort this past semester that covered a lot of the history behind computational poetry. Might be worth looking at yourself. You can see some of the work I created here [1].
[0] http://nickm.com/classes/the_word_made_digital/2018_spring/
[1] http://freezine.xyz/montfort/
I understand you are talking about this[1] book? I am not, yet, in the topic and it seems it is the right time to enter.
[1] https://nickm.com/twisty/
This article has some research into possible origins of the name: https://nickm.com/post/2010/01/a-note-on-the-word-zork/comment-page-1/index.html