Virtual machineIn computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination of the two.
InfocomInfocom, Inc. 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. Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979, by staff and students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lasted as an independent company until 1986, when it was bought by Activision.
ZorkZork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—ZorkI: The Great Underground Empire, ZorkII: The Wizard of Frobozz, and ZorkIII: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980.
ActivisionAmerican video game publisherActivision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It is the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016.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 programming 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.
ByteThe byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as the Internet Protocol (RFC791) refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet.
Interactive fictionInteractive fiction (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.
Marc BlankMarc 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 adventurecomputer games, Zork. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time. CareerBlank 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.
Lisp (programming language)Programming language familyLisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesizedprefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, it is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use, after Fortran. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history.
Unix-likeA Unix-likeoperating system (sometimes referred to as a UN*X,*nix or *NIX) is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-like application is one that behaves like the corresponding Unix command or shell.Z-machineThe Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform.ZIP (file format)ZIP is an archive file format that supports lossless data compression. A ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed. The ZIP file format permits a number of compression algorithms, though DEFLATE is the most common. This format was originally created in 1989 and was first implemented in PKWARE, Inc.'s PKZIP utility, as a replacement for the previous ARC compression format by Thom Henderson.*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.