Show HN: Resurrecting Infocom's Unix Z-Machine with Cosmopolitan

i think ucsd p-system vm predates z-machine by a couple of years (re OP's origin of vm use comment)

Interesting to know, thanks. My intention with that comment was in pondering about vms distributed commercially in the home market, which I don't think I made clear enough in the post. :/

What's remarkable about Infocom's z-machine is the level of sophistication and polish vs the intended application, maybe unsurprising coming from MIT graduates with access to a PDP-10 as a development platform. Otherwise the use of virtual machines was, maybe not common, but not unusual.

* TinyBasic (1975) was specified (and sometimes implemented) as a VM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC

* Apple Pascal (1979) was a UCSD Pascal system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pascal

* The COSMAC VIP computer/console's (1977) games were programmed in CHIP-8, a VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

* Scott Adams' text adventures (1978+) used an application-specific VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_International

* Wozniak's SWEET16 contained in Apple II Integer Basic (1977) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

* If you count Forth as a VM, it was pretty common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)

Blank and Berez were definitely thinking about p-machines when they designed the Z machine, and there is a hat tip in the 1980 Creative Computing article describing its inner workings.

[1]: https://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm

You must have done little research to remember those. I knew all but two. (COmSAC and Sweet16).

I wonder if the wikipedia articles are lucky enough to be good...

There were a bunch of minicomputer and the Unix operating systems that would arguable have been better than Microsoft’s entries. But it just wasn’t in the DNA of those companies to sell a consumer-priced operating systems.

The TV show, in it's absurdity, pointed me to the radio show, which I adored, which led me to read all the books, so when the game came out we laughingly struggled with it, for months, until the sales guy at egghead gave us just a few hints...

A dacade later, ztools was able to read it's dictionary, and people would ask what it was all about... We distributed libraries on bbses, Napster, all manner or ways to get the media out so people could laugh... And most of them found their way back to the Adams books and recordings. We never distributed the books, unless the 2nd half was deleted... ( Waldens, which was beside Egghead, would to though spurts where Adams books would make the best sellers lists, and fade, and enjoy multiple resurgences. )

Go and buy the books (Douglas Adams) and use them for gifts.

And the founders were AFAIK mostly looking at games as a testbed for bigger and better things—a mindset that unfortunately led to the Cornerstone database.