A nice read, and it was nice to learn the back story of rogue. One slight correction: PLATO was at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), not Chicago. I think there were some terminals at UIC, but not U of C.
There was another rogue clone that I remember grabbing from Usenet back in the day, by Tim Stoehr. It was intended to be as direct a clone as possible (nethack was already a thing by thing by then). I implemented hand grenades in my long-lost copy.
It just so happens I did some work on "rogue clone" a few weeks ago – this will run on most modern systems (AFAIK) and has a few convenience enhancements: https://github.com/arp242/rogue-clone
There was another rogue clone that I remember grabbing from Usenet back in the day, by Tim Stoehr. It was intended to be as direct a clone as possible (nethack was already a thing by thing by then). I implemented hand grenades in my long-lost copy.
https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Rogue_Clone
Unfortunately, link rot has set in. Only the Sourceforge link still works:
https://rogueclone.sourceforge.net/
It seems to be a DOS/Windows port.