I’m pretty sure Infocom created the complex sentence parser system, but I could be mistaken. It seems like a small thing, but text adventure games usually used a simple verb/noun system, but Infocom games allowed for elaborate commands to be used. So they had their own technical achievements.
I like Infocom games, especially the detective games like Witness and Suspect. And Return to Zork is one of my favorite games of all time. Yeah it had really cheesy acting, but it was amazing back then and it had an excellent story and good interface. I consider the opening movie to be one of the best ever in a game. It combines the familiar old text adventure style of Zork with the epicness of the new era of cd-rom gaming.
As for the Star Wars question. I never heard of Star Wars being the first game to have graphics, I’m sure that’s false because Pong predated it for one among lots of other games. Unless there’s some technical reason those aren’t considered ‘graphics.’