Welcome to the SCript Interpeter site! The primary focus here is on the SCI programming language. The SCI language, developed by Jeff Stephenson at Sierra On-Line in 1987, is a language that only those lucky enough to work at Sierra during the late 80s and early to mid 90s have had the joy of working with. That is until fairly recently when tools such as SCI Studio and SCI Companion introduced the world at large to this amazing and powerful programming language. But the syntax used by those tools is based on only a handful of clues and is apparently quite different from the original language that Jeff Stephenson created. Wouldn't it be nice to know more about what the original language was like?
When the SCI interpreter was first built (and prior to the release of King's Quest 4), the SCI interpreter was apparently known simply as SCript Interpreter. We know this from The Official Book of King's Quest that was published in 1988. Although published after the release of King's Quest 4, this book was mostly written during the development of the SCI version of King's Quest 4. Page 16 of the first edition says this:
"The programmer is the one who puts all the rooms and animated characters together to make the game run. He does this using a special computer language called SCI (SCript Interpreter) developed by Sierra. SCI is an object-oriented language similar to LISP; it's written in Assembler, C, and itself." Donald B. Trivette
We also know that when SCI went public its name was changed to Sierra Creative Interpreter for marketing reasons. This is mentioned on Al Lowe's web site:
"Later, when Sierra went public, someone in marketing made up the much more saleable phrase, “Sierra’s Creative Interpreter.” Jeff originally called it SCI simply because it ran scripts." Al Lowe.
Some web sites claim that the original name was Script Code Interpreter. Either way, it was simply an interpreter that ran Scripts. Depending on who you talk to, the name of the language may have been any one of the following: SC, Script or SCI. I quite like the idea that it may have been called Script. The reason for this is that "Script" to me conveys the idea of a movie script. The SCI language has a number of classes with very suggestive names, such as Actor, Prop and Extra. These are all "movie script" concepts. Whether this is why it was called Script we may never know (Jeff, I would love to hear from you at some point if you ever read this).
Perhaps the source of all truth regarding the original name of the interpreter is the interpreter itself:
$ strings SCIV.EXE | grep Script
Script Interpreter, Copyright (C) 1987 Sierra On-Line, Inc.