How can I start playing old-school interactive fiction and text-based games?

The simplest article in which I just put some links with brief descriptions. No emulators or true ways to play text-based games - just a list, just a list.

Should've done it before.

Well, I assume you are the one who really enjoys reading (nowadays it's a rare thing) and the most of books you've read aren't Paulo Coelho's ones. You are also hardcore gamer who can play games even without (omg!) cool graphics provided by modern cryengine.

1. http://textadventures.co.uk/

That's the first one. You go there, you choose a game, you play it via browser. There are a lot of new games as well as old ones. Games there can look like this (actually, this is the best look and style you can find):

Second example:

That's right, you have some additional information, but no old-school command-line style, no Courier fonts (not even Lucida Console one :))

Yet another example:

Some of you may think games that look like this lose their atmospheres - and I agree with that.

2. http://www.web-adventures.org/

Same style, different url + no new games, only old-school ones.

Zork looks like this there:

This is my personal test of any game. You type 'Hello' and you already see is this game promising or not. As you may notice, the same game on one site says 'I am dumb and can't recognize a verb' but another says 'goodbye' - not sure if it was present in the original version of Zork. Maybe I'll review Zork later...

Yet another example you can find there: Galatea by Emily Short.

Style is again awful, yeah (but we are here not for the graphics, right?), and game's NPC fails to answer the simplest question 'how are you?', but still you can try to play it.

Also, you can find some games to play there:

3.) http://playfic.com/

And there:

4.) http://ifdb.tads.org/

Almost every game you may find on these sites has the same design:

Seems these creations use the same game engine.

Well, that's it. If you want to try this weird type of games where you don't have unreal engine powered on, sites listed above are the first places you should visit. They are simple, they look ugly, they work and you don't even need to download something like emulators of zx-spectrum.

I will try to find and review an interesting game for newcomers in a nearest future.