I feel they evoked so much of the imagination, as really anything could potentially happen.
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Yes, in reality, when you typed things in, the game would often respond "I do not understand that."
And this was a weakness and frustration of the games, but really more of a weakness of the design and implementation of that specific game, not the text parser interface in itself.
I hope text parser (or at least human language) interfaces make more of a comeback in future.