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My obsession with Zork and other Infocom games introduced me to computing concepts such as virtual machines, platform-independent intermediate language, variabl
by stevoski 9y ago
My obsession with Zork and other Infocom games introduced me to computing concepts such as virtual machines, platform-independent intermediate language, variable length text encoding, and natural language processing.
I recall finding old Byte magazines in the university library that revealed the internals of Infocom's games. I felt like I had uncovered hidden gold.
I even think the first time I encountered the word "database" was in an explanation of how you could code a simple text adventure game.
- fsiefken 9y agoDo you know from which year they were?
- abecedarius 9y agoAn adventure game issue in 1980. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12
- ghaff 9y agoHe might have been thinking of this issue: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12 There's an article by David Liebling who worked for Infocom. There's also an article by Scott Adams in the issue.
- rrauenza 9y agoOn page 7 is an add for Shugart! Later renamed to Seagate!
- ghaff 9y agoThe ads in there are great. That issue actually predates the IBM PC by a year (and my own exposure to microcomputers to any great degree by about the same length of time). So this is serious blast from the past before things standardized in any but very broad-brush ways.