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Tim Anderson (Zork)
Tim Anderson is a computer programmer who helped create the adventure game ''Zork'', one of the first works of interactive fiction and an early descendant of ''ADVENT'' (also known as ''Colossal Cave Adventure''). The first version of ''Zork'' was written in 1977–1979 in the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling. All four were members of the Dynamic Modeling Group at the MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ... Laboratory for Computer Science. References *https://web.archive.org/web/20090116035446/http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html Infocom Living people People from Sudbury, Massachusetts Video game programmers Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-compu-bio-s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Programmer
A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates computer software or applications by providing a specific programming language to the computer. Most programmers have extensive computing and coding experience in many varieties of programming languages and platforms, such as Structured Query Language (SQL), Perl, Extensible Markup Language (XML), PHP, HTML, C, C++ and Java. A programmer's most often-used computer language (e.g., Assembly, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Lisp, Python, Java, etc.) may be prefixed to the aforementioned terms. Some who work with web programming languages may also prefix their titles with ''web''. Terminology There is no industry-wide standard terminology, so "programmer" and "software engineer" might refer to the same role at different companies. Most typically ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adventure Game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (List of text-based computer games, text and List of graphic adventure games, graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include ''Zork'', ''King's Quest'', ''Monkey Island'', and ''Myst''. Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, using text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with better grap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zork
''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—''Zork I: The Great Underground Empire'', ''Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz'', and ''Zork III: The Dungeon Master''—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In ''Zork'', the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction. The original game, developed between 1977 and 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of Tec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interactive Fiction
'' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be " text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colossal Cave Adventure
''Colossal Cave Adventure'' (also known as ''Adventure'' or ''ADVENT'') is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The game is composed of dozens of locations, and the player moves between these locations and interacts with objects in them by typing one- or two-word commands which are interpreted by the game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game, for which it was also the namesake. The original game, written in 1975 and 1976, was based on Crowther's maps and experiences caving in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the longest cave system in the world; further, it was intended ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MDL Programming Language
MDL (Model Development Language, or colloquially also referred to as More Datatypes than Lisp or MIT Design Language) is a programming language, a descendant of the language Lisp. Its initial purpose was to provide high level language support for the Dynamic Modeling Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Project MAC. It was developed in 1971 on a PDP-10 running ITS and later ran on TENEX, TOPS-20, BSD, and AEGIS. The initial development team consisted of Gerald Sussman and Carl Hewitt of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Chris Reeve, Bruce Daniels, and David Cressey of the Dynamic Modeling Group. Later, Stu Galley, also of the Dynamic Modeling Group, wrote the MDL documentation. MDL was initially called ''Muddle''. This style of self-deprecating humor was not widely understood or appreciated outside of Project MAC. So the name was sanitized to MDL. MDL provides several enhancements to classic Lisp. It supports several built-in data types, including list ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PDP-10
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used. The PDP-10's architecture is almost identical to that of DEC's earlier PDP-6, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the ''byte'' instructions, which operate on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive, according to the general definition of a byte as ''a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits''. The PDP-10 was found in many university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard University's Aiken Computation Laboratory, MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marc Blank
Marc Blank is an American game developer and software engineer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first commercially successful text adventure computer games, ''Zork''. Career Blank first encountered Don Woods and Will Crowther's ''Adventure'' game while he was studying at MIT in the mid-1970s, where the game was played on mainframe computers. Blank was frustrated by the computer's tiny vocabulary; when it parsed user inputs very few words were recognized. After thinking about the problem during his undergraduate years, he started work on his own adventure game using MDL, a computer language invented at MIT. Blank and a handful of friends wrote the original version of ''Zork'' on a PDP-10 while he was attending medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City (he received his MD degree in 1979). The free-play university version of ''Zork'' first became available on the MIT-DM PDP-10 in June 1977. It was then distributed by the D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bruce Daniels
Bruce Daniels is an American hydroclimatologist, business executive and computer programmer. He is known in Silicon Valley as one of the pioneers of the personal computer and user-friendly interfaces. Daniels earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz after receiving an Sc.B. and S.M. in computer science from MIT. He specializes in water-related impacts of climate change, especially in the American West. His contributions to decisions concerning California water quality date to 2003, when he was appointed to the state's Regional Water Quality Control Board. In 2011, he was honored as an ARCS Scholar in Northern California. In 2016, he serves as the elected president of the board of directors of the Soquel Creek Water District in Santa Cruz County, California. Daniels has also been a computer programmer and business executive who has worked for Hewlett Packard, Apple Computer, Oracle, Borland, Sun Microsystems and his own start-up, Singular Software, whi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dave Lebling
Peter David Lebling (born October 30, 1949) is an interactive fiction game designer ( implementor) and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid. Life and career He was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Maryland, and attended MIT, where he obtained a degree in political science before becoming a member of its Laboratory for Computer Science. After encountering the original ''Adventure'' game (also called ''Colossal Cave''), he was fascinated by the concept and—together with Marc Blank, Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels—set out to write an adventure game with a better parser, which became ''Zork''. In 1979, he became one of the founders of Infocom. His games include ''Zork I,'' ''II'' and ''III'', ''Starcross'', '' Suspect'', ''Spellbreaker'', ''The Lurking Horror'' and ''James Clavell's Shogun''. After Infocom's end in 1989, Lebling worked on a GUI spreadsheet program, joined Avid (a company doing special effects for broadcast and film) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''. Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979, by staff and students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lasted as an independent company until 1986, when it was bought by Activision. Activision shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom ''Zork'' brand. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002. Overview Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted. Generally the program will respond by describing the results of the action, often the contents of a room if the player has moved within the virtual world. The user reads this information, decides what to do, and enters another short serie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Living People
Related categories * :Year of birth missing (living people) / :Year of birth unknown * :Date of birth missing (living people) / :Date of birth unknown * :Place of birth missing (living people) / :Place of birth unknown * :Year of death missing / :Year of death unknown * :Date of death missing / :Date of death unknown * :Place of death missing / :Place of death unknown * :Missing middle or first names See also * :Dead people * :Template:L, which generates this category or death years, and birth year and sort keys. : {{DEFAULTSORT:Living people 21st-century people People by status ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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