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The Prisoner (computer Game)
''The Prisoner'' is a 1980 Apple II computer game produced by Edu-Ware. The game was loosely based on the 1960s television series ''The Prisoner'' and incorporates that show's themes about the loss of individuality in a technological, controlling society. The player's role is that of an intelligence agent who has resigned from his job for reasons known only to himself, and who has been abducted to an isolated island community that seems designed to be his own personal prison. The island's authorities will use any means—including coercion, disorientation, deception, and frustration—to learn why their prisoner has resigned, and every character, location, and apparent escape route seem to be part of a grand scheme to trick the player into revealing a code number representing the prisoner's reason for resigning. The game occasionally breaks the fourth wall by acknowledging that a game is being played. Considered unique among interactive fiction games of its era, ''The Prisone ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Mullich
David Mullich () is an American game producer and designer best known for creating the cult classic 1980 adventure game ''The Prisoner'', producing the 1995 adaptation '' I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream'', and developing many games in the ''Heroes of Might and Magic'' franchise. With a career spanning more than twenty-five years, Mullich worked not only for some of the first video game publishers, but went on to work for some of the biggest game companies of today. Career Mullich's work in video games began at the birth of the video game industry in 1978 when his COBOL professor at California State University, Northridge hired him to work as a clerk and programmer at Rainbow Computing, one of the first computer stores to open in the Los Angeles area. Sherwin Steffin, who was a frequent customer at the store, recruited Mullich to develop games for his new start-up game publishing company, Edu-Ware Services. Upon graduating in 1980 with a degree in computer science, Mullich ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Simpsons
''The Simpsons'' is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical depiction of American life, epitomized by the Simpson family, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The show is set in the fictional town of Springfield and parodies American culture and society, television, and the human condition. The family was conceived by Groening shortly before a solicitation for a series of animated shorts with producer James L. Brooks. He created a dysfunctional family and named the characters after his own family members, substituting Bart for his own name; he thought Simpson was a funny name in that it sounded similar to " simpleton". The shorts became a part of '' The Tracey Ullman Show'' on April 19, 1987. After three seasons, the sketch was developed into a half-hour prime time show and became Fox's first series to land in the Top 30 ratings in a season (1989–1990). Since its debut on Dece ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BASIC
BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. In addition to the program language, Kemeny and Kurtz developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), which allowed multiple users to edit and run BASIC programs simultaneously on remote terminals. This general model became very popular on minicomputer systems like the PDP-11 and Data General Nova in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hewlett-Packard produced an entire computer line for this method of operation, introducing the HP2000 series in the late 1960s and continuing sales into the 1980s. Many early video games trace their ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apple II Graphics
The Apple II graphics were composed of idiosyncratic modes and settings that could be exploited. This graphics system debuted on the original Apple II, continued with the Apple II Plus and was carried forward and expanded with the Apple IIe, Enhanced IIe, IIc, IIc Plus and IIGS. Peculiarity of graphics modes The graphic modes of the Apple II series were peculiar even by the standards of the late 1970s and early 1980s. One notable peculiarity of these modes is a direct result of Apple founder Steve Wozniak's chip-saving design. Many home computer systems of the time (as well as today's PC-compatible machines) had an architecture which assigned consecutive blocks of memory to non-consecutive rows on the screen in graphic modes, i.e., interleaving. Apple's text and graphics modes are based on two different interleave factors of 8:1 and 64:1. A second peculiarity of Apple II graphics—the so-called "color fringes"—is yet another by-product of Wozniak's design. While t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ASCII Art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, as on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation. Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs at the time. "Studies in Perception I" by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon from 1966 shows some examples of their early ASCII art. "1966 Studies in Perception I by Ken Knowlton and Leon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Video Game Graphics
A variety of computer graphic techniques have been used to display video game content throughout the history of video games. The predominance of individual techniques have evolved over time, primarily due to hardware advances and restrictions such as the processing power of central or graphics processing units. Text-based Some of the earliest video games were text games or text-based games that used text characters instead of bitmapped or vector graphics. Examples include MUDs (''multi-user dungeons''), where players could read or view depictions of rooms, objects, other players, and actions performed in the virtual world; and roguelikes, a subgenre of role-playing video games featuring many monsters, items, and environmental effects, as well as an emphasis on randomization, replayability and permanent death. Some of the earliest text games were developed for computer systems which had no video display at all. Text games are typically easier to write and require less proce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Milgram Experiment
The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real. The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology'' [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Applesoft BASIC
Applesoft BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC, developed by Marc McDonald and Ric Weiland, supplied with the Apple II series of computers. It supersedes Integer BASIC and is the BASIC in ROM in all Apple II series computers after the original Apple II model. It is also referred to as FP BASIC (from floating point) because of the Apple DOS command used to invoke it, instead of INT for Integer BASIC. Applesoft BASIC was supplied by Microsoft and its name is derived from the names of both Apple Computer and Microsoft. Apple employees, including Randy Wigginton, adapted Microsoft's interpreter for the Apple II and added several features. The first version of Applesoft was released in 1977 on cassette tape and lacked proper support for high-resolution graphics. Applesoft II, which was made available on cassette and disk and in the ROM of the Apple II Plus and subsequent models, was released in 1978. It is this latter version, which has some syntax differences and support for the A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hangman (game)
Hangman is a guessing game for two or more players. One player thinks of a word, phrase or sentence and the other(s) tries to guess it by suggesting letters within a certain number of guesses. Originally a Paper-and-pencil game, there are now electronic versions. History Though the origins of the game are unknown, a variant is mentioned in a book of children's games assembled by Alice Gomme in 1894 called Birds, Beasts, and Fishes. This version lacks the image of a hanged man, instead relying on keeping score as to the number of attempts it took each player to fill in the blanks. A version which incorporated hanging imagery was described in a 1902 ''Philadelphia Inquirer'' article, which stated that it was popular at "White Cap" parties hosted by "Vigilance Committees" where guests would wear "white peaked caps with masks"."A White Cap Party"< ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sim City
''SimCity'' is an open-ended city-building video game series originally designed by Will Wright. The first game in the series, ''SimCity'', was published by Maxis in 1989 and were followed by several sequels and many other spin-off "''Sim''" titles, including 2000's ''The Sims'', which itself became a best-selling computer game and franchise. Maxis developed the series independently until 1997, and continued under the ownership of Electronic Arts until 2003. EA commissioned various spinoffs from other companies during the 2000s, focusing on console and mobile releases. A 2013 EA-Maxis reboot was subject to what has been described as "one of the most disastrous launches in history", which may have triggered the 2015 shutdown of Maxis Emeryville and the end of the franchise. Gameplay ''SimCity'' titles are real-time management and construction simulators. Across most titles, the player (acting as mayor) is given a blank map to begin and must expand the city with the budg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ELIZA
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, Eliza simulated conversation by using a "pattern matching" and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no built in framework for contextualizing events. Directives on how to interact were provided by "scripts", written originally in MAD-Slip, which allowed ELIZA to process user inputs and engage in discourse following the rules and directions of the script. The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist (in particular, Carl Rogers, who was well known for simply parroting back at patients what they had just said), and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Castle (novel)
''The Castle'' (german: Das Schloss, link=no, also spelled ''Das Schloß'' ) is the last novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as "K." arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Count Westwest. Kafka died before he could finish the work and the novel was posthumously published against his wishes. Dark and at times surreal, ''The Castle'' is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal. History Kafka began writing the novel on the evening of 27 January 1922, the day he arrived at the mountain resort of (now in the Czech Republic). A picture taken of him upon his arrival shows him by a horse-drawn sleigh in the snow in a setting reminiscent of ''The Castle''. Hence, the significance that the first few ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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