 Around 1971 , DEC employee David H. Ahl had written a version of The Sumer Game in the BASIC programming language . Unlike FOCAL , BASIC was run not just on mainframe computers and minicomputers , but also on personal computers , then termed microcomputers , making it a much more popular language . In 1973 , Ahl published BASIC Computer Games , a best @-@ selling book of games written in BASIC whose 1978 edition was the first million @-@ selling computer book , which included his version of The Sumer Game . The expanded version was renamed Hamurabi and added an end @-@ of @-@ game performance appraisal . The popularity of both the book and the programming language itself meant that Ahl 's version of the game became the more widely known version over the relatively obscure original , as evidenced by the 1973 French FOCAL version considering " Hamurabi " to be the more prominent name . BASIC Computer Games noted that the game was a modification of a game " written in FOCAL at DEC " , but listed the author as " unknown . " The 1978 edition of the book noted that the game 's name was intended to be " Hammurabi " , the correct spelling of the Babylonian king , but not only was one " m " dropped in the file name to fit in an eight @-@ character limit , but Ahl consistently misspelled the name inside of the game , leading to the generally accepted name of the game to be Hamurabi . 
