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

(1) The UCSD p-Machine was contemporaneous and made it feasible to compile Pascal for machines like the 6502 which were terrible targets for conventional compilers. It was atrocious in every way, particularly atrociously slow. At the time many CS professors with Microsoft BASIC being the dominant teaching languages but UCSD plus the inability to do systems programming in ISO Pascal made a generation of young programmers hate Pascal with passion.

(2) Scott Adams made an adventure interpreter was was similar but less sophisticated than the z-machine but similarly portable, in fact you could write a Scott Adams interpreter in BASIC [1] but he also wrote interpreters in assembly for the most popular platforms

https://6502disassembly.com/a2-scott-adams/interp.html

(3) Infocom developed the games on a PDP-10 machine which might be the last general purpose computer that survived with other than the 8-bit byte. (Though it had bitwise addressing which helped it cope with the industry going in that direction).

[1] Notably if you tried to write an adventure game in straight up BASIC you'd struggle. It's not like you could look up a verb in a hashtable and dispatch to subroutine. You'd be writing incredibly long if-then-else ladders nested inside if-then-else ladders which is bad enough in a civilized language.