The Quill (software)
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The Quill (software)
''The Quill'' is a program to write home computer adventure games. Written by Graeme Yeandle, it was published on the ZX Spectrum by Gilsoft in December 1983. Although available to the general public, it was used by several games companies to create best-selling titles; over 450 commercially published titles for the ZX Spectrum were written using ''The Quill''. Development Yeandle has stated that the inspiration for ''The Quill'' was an article in the August 1980 issue of ''Practical Computing'' by Ken Reed in which Reed described the use of a database to produce an adventure game. After Yeandle wrote one database-driven adventure game, ''Timeline'', for Gilsoft, he realised that a database editor was needed, and it was this software which became ''The Quill''. After the original ZX Spectrum version was ported to the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit family, and Apple II and Oric. Versions were also published by CodeWriter, Inc. in North America (under the name of ''Ad ...
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Gilsoft
Gilsoft was a British developer of video games and related utilities. The company was best known for developing the text adventure authoring tool '' The Quill'' and its successor, ''Professional Adventure Writer''. History Gilsoft was set up by Tim Gilberts, at the time aged 17, in the early 1980s, using money from his father, who ran an electronics store. Gilberts had been writing software for the ZX81 prior to founding Gilsoft, but with the release of the ZX Spectrum, he was convinced that he could make money by satisfying the demand for games for the new platform. Many early titles developed by Gilberts for the Spectrum were clones of arcade games, among a few original titles. Gilsoft was initially run as a family business, with Gilberts acting as technical director, his father as managing director, his mother as company secretary, and his cousin as accountant. Other employees were mostly made up of friends and neighbours of the Gilberts family. In 1982, Gilsoft was joined by ...
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Swedish Language
Swedish ( ) is a North Germanic language spoken predominantly in Sweden and in parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, the fourth most spoken Germanic language and the first among any other of its type in the Nordic countries overall. Swedish, like the other Nordic languages, is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish, although the degree of mutual intelligibility is largely dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker. Written Norwegian and Danish are usually more easily understood by Swedish speakers than the spoken languages, due to the differences in tone, accent, and intonation. Standard Swedish, spoken by most Swedes, is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties ...
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Text Adventure Game Engines
Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preaching **Textbook, a book of instruction in any branch of study Computing and telecommunications *Plain text, unformatted text *Text file, a type of computer file opened by most text software *Text string, a sequence of characters manipulated by software *Text message, a short electronic message designed for communication between mobile phone users *Text (Chrome app), a text editor for the Google Chrome web browser Arts and media *TEXT, a Swedish band *''Text & Talk'' (formerly ''Text''), an academic journal *"Text", a 2010 song produced by J.R. Rotem, featuring Mann and Jason Derulo Jason Joel Desrouleaux (born September 21, 1989), known professionally as Jason Derulo (; formerly stylized as Derülo), is an American singer and songwrit ...
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Commodore 64 Software
The Commodore 64 amassed a large software library of nearly 10,000 commercial titles, covering most genres from games to business applications, and many others. Applications, utility, and business software While the 1541 disk drive's slow performance made the Commodore 64 mostly unsuitable as a business computer, it was still widely used for many important tasks, including computer graphics creation, desktop publishing, and word processing. Info 64, the first magazine produced with desktop publishing tools, was created on and dedicated to the Commodore platform. The best known art package was perhaps KoalaPainter, primarily because of its own custom graphics tablet user interface - the KoalaPad. Another popular drawing program for the C64 was Doodle!. A Commodore 64 version of The Print Shop existed, allowing users to generate signs and banners with a printer. "The Newsroom" was a desktop publishing suite. Lightpens and CAD drawing software were also commercially produced, such ...
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1983 Software
The year 1983 saw both the official beginning of the Internet and the first mobile cellular telephone call. Events January * January 1 – The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP is officially completed (this is considered to be the beginning of the true Internet). * January 24 – Twenty-five members of the Red Brigades are sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1978 murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro. * January 25 ** High-ranking Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in Bolivia. ** IRAS is launched from Vandenberg AFB, to conduct the world's first all-sky infrared survey from space. February * February 2 – Giovanni Vigliotto goes on trial on charges of polygamy involving 105 women. * February 3 – Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser is granted a double dissolution of both houses of parliament, for elections on March 5, 1983. As Fraser is being granted the dissolution, Bill Hayden resigns as leader of the Australian Labor Party, and in the subsequent le ...
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CP/M
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors. The combination of CP/M and S-100 bus computers became an early standard in the microcomputer industry. This computer platform was widely used in business through the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s. CP/M increased the market size for both hardware and software by greatly reducing the amount of programming required to install an application on a new manufacturer's computer. An important driver of software innovation was the advent of (comparatively) low-cost microcomputers running CP/M, as independent programmers and hackers bought them and shared their crea ...
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Professional Adventure Writer
Professional Adventure Writer or PAW (sometimes called PAWS for Professional Adventure Writing System) is a program that allows the user to write textual adventure games with graphic illustrations. It was written by Tim Gilberts, Graeme Yeandle and Phil Wade, based on Yeandle's earlier system called The Quill. PAW was published by Gilsoft in 1987 and quickly gained a loyal following. PAW improved over The Quill in several ways. In particular, its textual input parser was more sophisticated, meaning inputs were no longer confined to the two-word telegraphic ''verb noun'' (e.g. "GO WEST; TAKE LAMP") style. PAW also supported NPCs, different character sets, and full use of the memory of the 128K ZX Spectrum. However, unlike their prequel ''The Quill'', the PAW no longer supported other computer systems like the BBC Micro or the Commodore 64. Over 400 games were written using PAW. To ensure that as much text as possible can be used, PAWS compresses the descriptions by replacing th ...
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Computer And Video Games
''Computer and Video Games'' (also known as ''CVG'', ''Computer & Video Games'', ''C&VG'', ''Computer + Video Games'', or ''C+VG'') was a UK-based video game magazine, published in its original form between 1981 and 2004. Its offshoot website was launched in 1999 and closed in February 2015. ''CVG'' was the longest-running video game media brand in the world. History ''Computer and Video Games'' was established in 1981, being the first British games magazine. Initially published monthly between November 1981 and October 2004 and solely web-based from 2004 onwards, the magazine was one of the first publications to capitalise on the growing home computing market, although it also covered arcade games. At the time of launch it was the world's first dedicated video games magazine. The first issue featured articles on ''Space Invaders'', Chess, Othello and advice on how to learn programming. The magazine had a typical ABC of 106,000. Website Launched in August 1999, CVG was o ...
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Your Spectrum
''Your Sinclair'', or ''YS'' as it was commonly abbreviated, was a commercially published and printed British computer magazine for the Sinclair range of computers, mainly the ZX Spectrum. It was in circulation between 1984 and 1993. History The magazine was launched in January 1984 as ''Your Spectrum'' by Sportscene Specialist Press. (Sportscene would later be renamed to Dennis Publishing in April 1987.) Initially, it was published bimonthly, changing to monthly in June 1984. With the January 1986 issue, the title was relaunched as ''Your Sinclair'', with the intention of expanding coverage of the QL into the main magazine (previously, ''QL User'' had been a pull-out section within the magazine), and any future computers produced by Sinclair. However, the magazine remained focused almost entirely on the ZX Spectrum games scene. In 1990, the magazine was sold to Bath-based Future plc, and the April 1990 issue was the first to be published by the new company. That issue's news ...
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2D Computer Graphics
2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models (such as 2D geometric models, text, and digital images) and by techniques specific to them. It may refer to the branch of computer science that comprises such techniques or to the models themselves. 2D computer graphics are mainly used in applications that were originally developed upon traditional printing and drawing technologies, such as typography, cartography, technical drawing, advertising, etc. In those applications, the two-dimensional image is not just a representation of a real-world object, but an independent artifact with added semantic value; two-dimensional models are therefore preferred, because they give more direct control of the image than 3D computer graphics (whose approach is more akin to photography than to typography). In many domains, such as desktop publishing, engineering, and business, a description of a document based on 2D computer grap ...
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Parser
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Latin ''pars'' (''orationis''), meaning part (of speech). The term has slightly different meanings in different branches of linguistics and computer science. Traditional sentence parsing is often performed as a method of understanding the exact meaning of a sentence or word, sometimes with the aid of devices such as sentence diagrams. It usually emphasizes the importance of grammatical divisions such as subject and predicate. Within computational linguistics the term is used to refer to the formal analysis by a computer of a sentence or other string of words into its constituents, resulting in a parse tree showing their syntactic relation to each other, which may also contain semantic and other information (p-values). Some parsing algor ...
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