Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California
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If you like long-form journalism and great blogs full of quality content, you should already be reading The Digital Antiquarian about the foundation and early days of the video game scene, with a tight focus on Infocom in particular.
Today he's posted the death of Infocom, Moving to California. It's sad and tragic and amazing.
All of his blog posts are amazing.
Anyway, read it.
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Hmm, Infocom. Wikipedia says they made the Zork series. Then, a bunch of "interactive fiction" titles during the 80-ies. Not my scene. Then a few other games during the 90-ies, all of which kind of sucked.
Sounds like the market decided their fate
I'll read the article later.
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@cartman82 said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
Hmm, Infocom. Wikipedia says they made the Zork series. Then, a bunch of "interactive fiction" titles during the 80-ies. Not my scene. Then a few other games during the 90-ies, all of which kind of sucked.
Sounds like the market decided their fate
I'll read the article later.
More significantly, they were one of the early pioneers in the use of bytecode-based virtual machines to simplify cross-platform development. Their Z-Machine (Z is for Zork) came out in 1979, predating the JVM and the CLR by over 15 years.
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@masonwheeler said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
Their Z-Machine (Z is for Zork) came out in 1979, predating the JVM and the CLR by over 15 years.
That was still at least a decade after bytecode systems were invented. ("Fun" fact: I was actually taught by their inventor. He bored me to death with his mandatory lectures on software engineering.) The whole idea has been around for ages.
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@dkf said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
("Fun" fact: I was actually taught by their inventor. He bored me to death with his mandatory lectures on software engineering.) The whole idea has been around for ages.
Yeah but what video games did he make? Huh? Huhhuh????
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@blakeyrat said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
Yeah but what video games did he make?
It was someone else who invented the video game. (The closest Martin Richards ever got to that sort of thing was probably trying to get his code to compile. He was that boring...)
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@dkf said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
@masonwheeler said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
Their Z-Machine (Z is for Zork) came out in 1979, predating the JVM and the CLR by over 15 years.
That was still at least a decade after bytecode systems were invented. ("Fun" fact: I was actually taught by their inventor. He bored me to death with his mandatory lectures on software engineering.) The whole idea has been around for ages.
...which is why I said "one of the early pioneers" and not "the inventors of". (I consider them early pioneers because they were doing it long before Java brought the concept into the mainstream.)
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@masonwheeler said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
(I consider them early pioneers because they were doing it long before Java brought the concept into the mainstream.)
P-code was very well known at the time that Zork was first written.
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@dkf More like three, though the earliest ones (circa 1948-1952) were used solely for the purpose of simplifying floating-point arithmetic on machines with no FP hardware; the programs would call the interpreter as a subroutine with a list of operations for it to perform.
Filed Under: I don't know what a decade is
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@ScholRLEA said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
circa 1948-1952
Check your
privilegetimeline.
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@dkf No, late 1940s is correct. FP interpreters pre-dated assemblers and linkers, according to what I have read; because even calling FP subroutines with a dataset was problematic, the best way to have a library of floating-point routines was to have an interpreter that could be included in a deck to be run and have the data to be operated on in another one. No kidding. The simulated instructions would be written in hex just like the non-simulated code.
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@ScholRLEA said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
FP interpreters pre-dated assemblers and linkers, according to what I have read
Arguably they were just the equivalent of microcode. That far back, the distinctions were harder to draw.
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@ScholRLEA Mind you, they were not full p-machines by any stretch of the imagination, being limited to a few FP arithmetic operations and maybe a conditional. But the idea of interpreting a bytecode was there from the start, being a pretty straightforward derivation of Gödel's and Turing's mathematics.
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@dkf said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
@ScholRLEA said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
FP interpreters pre-dated assemblers and linkers, according to what I have read
Arguably they were just the equivalent of microcode. That far back, the distinctions were harder to draw.
That's an interesting point. I will have to think that over.
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@ScholRLEA said in Digital Antiquarian and Moving to California:
But the idea of interpreting a bytecode was there from the start, being a pretty straightforward derivation of Gödel's and Turing's mathematics.
Actually, the problem is in working out what was underneath. Those early systems were very small indeed (due to issues with reliability of the components if nothing else) and so it wasn't so much running a p-code, so much as swapping out one instruction set entirely for another totally different one.