@COLGeek Honestly, I find that fascinating. This year I had the good fortune to read a lot more on the dawn of the computer age.
You touched pretty much on its apparent fundamental tenets regarding early computer gaming: mainframes, D&D and the Apple II.
As you said, "a bunch of text based crawlers that have been lost to the depths of time and obscurity". Regarding computer games in particular, a lot of information is either hard to find or was not properly archived. My father was an early microcomputer user, from a hobbyist perspective - but he passed over 10 years ago and there's a lot of stuff I just can't ask him anymore. His brother, my uncle, actually sold mainframe computers in the 1980s for british company ICL, which were absorbed into Fujitsu in the late 90s early 00s. But most things weren't recorded: it was his job to sell them to businesses, not play with them.
Were these text based crawlers Adventure/Advent/Zork variations?
Or more the likes of Temple of Apshai and Eamon?
Maybe something a bit later, more contemporary to Ultima like The Black Onyx or Wizardry?