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Thread: Something completely different! (Well, Old...)

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    Default Something completely different! (Well, Old...)

    Being an 'Oldie' haha, I was wondering how many Young-uns' here would remember the likes of "Zork", (I, II, III) ???
    This was before the 'internet' as we know it. It was a Text-Based 'Prose' adventure game, that was originally written using a specialized
    variation of 'Lisp', on a Main-Frame. Over many years, (that I won't go in to), it was improved, and ported to many operating systems.
    (The Commodore-64 was my 1st introduction!). Even on the ubiquitous 'PC', it was split over 3 'Floppy-Disks', due to the current limitations
    of those initial machines, in regard to Memory & Processing power. This was just 'TEXT'... no graphics involved at all!! Yet it held most people
    captive, where such a 'game' was really taking place solely in your mind!

    40 years later, I found you can still play it, On-Line!...

    I know we have come a long way since then, but it still amazes me when viewing/playing that, again!, how much it relies on ones 'mental'
    imagery, not to mention the need to draw your own Maps to keep track of where you have been!... Was a walk down memory-lane...

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    Geeez....great memories. Any old mainframe users remember this?

    The fact that there's a highway to hell and a stairway to heaven says a lot about the anticipated traffic flow.

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    Quote Originally Posted by enf View Post
    Geeez....great memories. Any old mainframe users remember this?

    Yep, it was still around in 1979......

    usages.kangaroos.sound

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    Zork 1 was a great game. Ialso used to play "UFO-enemy unknown" which was the only game I ever finished. Later "Leisure suit Larry".... signs of a misspent youth! I gave up on games when winders came along. Though I must admit to having played more than my fair share of patience......
    I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

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    I am finding it hard to believe that so many people had access to mainframes in the 70's to play games.
    In my case I was too young to be allowed on them but even if I were qualified there was no way that I could have had access to the terminal for hours on end to play games. These things were used 24/7 in Germany.
    However next to the mainframe room was a much smaller room where they were introducing (constructing) a microprocessor replacement for the old mainframe using I believe 6-8 Datapoint terminals linked together. This was around 1977 and the first time I experienced what you would later call personal computers.
    I swear they were playing Zork on those. The problem was though that they to had swap out the hard drive platters for that. While they were running they were hermetically sealed but once opened for swap, exposed to a NON dust free environment.
    Then there was this one guy who you would never see without munching on a very crusty German bread roll.
    No, the extremely expensive head crash didn't happen only once.
    It wasn't me, I was too young to be allowed access to these too.

    Anyhow I wasn't interested in computer games until I privately purchased an early release Atari ST for music production and the first game I played on it was actually the ported Zork.
    As I mainly 'constructed' computers (ripped out the guts, modified them and built them into vending machines and such) I was very unskilled in typing on a keyboard.
    After playing Zork until 4:00 am (had to be at work at 9) I realised I had been typing like a Berserker, with incredibly low error rate.
    Back at work I would type two finger style 1-2 character/sec again, correcting too many typos.
    Last edited by Uncle Fester; 24-11-21 at 08:53 PM.
    Update: A deletion of features that work well and ain't broke but are deemed outdated in order to add things that are up to date and broken.
    Compatibility: A word soon to be deleted from our dictionaries as it is outdated.
    Humans: Entities that are not only outdated but broken... AI-self-learning-update-error...terminate...terminate...

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    who said we were allowed to access the mainframes, lol.......

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    I finished Zork 1, 2 and 3. Tried Liesure Suit Larry, but some how the graphics annoyed me.

    There was an Infocom game called “The Leather Goddesses of Phobos”. It was pretty warped and came with a scratch and sniff book.

    “You enter a room. Even a narrator as fond of lascivious detail as myself hesitates to describe the scene before you, suffice to say, it involves a goat, rubber tubing and a large quantity of lubricant”.
    Last edited by shred; 24-11-21 at 09:28 PM.

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    (O.P. here...) Thanks to all those who commented! To Uncle Fester, I only mentioned the original mainframe/lisp-modification to point out how it started.
    Quite quickly it was ported to many other common publicly available systems. For those who may be interested, I've found a *better* on-line version, to
    the link I first mentioned above... Go to *this* page...

    The site Author has completely re-written 'Zork-I' using JavaScript!! (Use your Browsers particular Keys to zoom in, for better reading if necessary).
    ALSO, unlike the other version I mentioned, you can SAVE/LOAD(RESTORE) multiple times, using your own case-sensitive FileNames.
    Here's a link to all his Source-Code too, on GitHub...

    And it may help to view some pre-made Maps, to help you get started, as per this example...

    And here's a list of most of the typical commands!!...

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