I actually don't think any UNIX variant ever shipped as a commerical product. My gut feeling while working on the project was that it was perhaps a reference implementation, documenting proper z-machine behavior the various assembly versions needed to match. But that's a literal guess, TBH.

The list of known system codes (used as identification for packaging and so forth) can be seen here: http://pdd.if-legends.org/infocom/fact-sheet.txt

thank you! I'll let this play out a few days. I have felt like I have been in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike on this one for a long time.

Impressive. Would love to have a .gif of that.

Hi, what a great site! I submitted my first story on HN yesterday, it got drowned with 0 votes ;). Later on I discovered this page, I think it fits much better here, so here it goes: Rescue on Fractalus was one of my favorite games on my Atari 800XL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_on_Fractalus!).

Here is a nice and completely free remake for Windows, Macs and Linux. There is even a VR version (Windows only)! I found this a few months ago and play it every once in a while - hope you enjoy it as well!

It was one of the first computer RPGs I played, and still one of the best computer implementations of D&D—especially early D&D. Personally, I still strongly prefer the fully-turn-based Gold Box combat system to the real-time-with-pause system popularized by Baldur's Gate.

There is now a Raylib port for Dreamcast, so I hope to see lots of homebrew DC love in the near future.

Yes, the game is running only on the screen, as the author’s main challenge was keeping it small. It's only 256 bytes in JavaScript.

https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno/blob/master/u...

Thanks for advise. Will do.

Sorry if it's out of topic. We have pretty cool retro-flavor game on error page: https://play.tirreno.com/game

Happy happy happy happy

I always loved the mood in Cold Dreams. Was way too difficult for me back then though :) Now that I look at it, its style looks like Bitmap Brothers ripoff, hehe. I'm so grateful that MobyGames serves clean PNG screenshots I can use. And of course that people take the time to submit them!

Hello, author here. The horizontal blur in the example images was the default one in Krita. I assume it's done in gamma space. There isn't much to do "properly" here since it's supposed to be a fast and loose hack. For example at larger scaling factors (like 5x) it just doesn't look right.

I'd really like a way to overlay this sort of effect over a web page and not affect mouse events or anything. Wouldn't it be awesome to run a shader over a whole webpage like you can with native rendering?

I was there back in the old days, and the example in the interview of "There are a number of applications where multitasking on a single user system could come in very handy. Here’s an example." were very artificial marketing driven.

In the 80s I would do things like file copy and printing to a serial port-attached printer in the background and I/O was bulletproof I don't recall ever having a problem on Level 1. It was slow and the floppy controller halted the computer severely but it never lost data or crashed, very nice.

On Level 2 I used Multi-Vue to run various combinations of editor, compiler, and executable in windows.

The main problem I had with OS-9 Level II and the dev system and Multivue is the complete software pack from Radio Shack was about $250... to run on a computer with a list price of $200... These were also the days when your CRT monitor and your hard drive (if you had one) typically cost 2x what your computer cost.

Another interesting quote from the interview was regarding a million cocos sold and only 100K disk drives sold by RS ... Note the base coco was $200 and for all practical purposes only available from RS, whereas the RS disk addon package was $300, a hundred dollars more than the base computer, and in comparison Rainbow/Hot Coco magazines were full of ads for cheaper floppy packages, like $225 to $250 price range.

Its interesting looking at old PDFs of Rainbow from the late 80s, I never noticed it at the time but 1/3 of the ads were for IBM/PC/XT compatible hardware, which seems weird for a "coco" magazine.

To my enormous surprise, forty-plus years later triple period now means something like recursive wildcard subdirectory in the Go language

# lists your standard library packages and workspace packages

go list ...

# Builds just your workspace as opposed to "go build ..." which is much more exciting, don't do that

go build ./...

I am rather jealous of the M68K as on a 6809 in the 80s running OS-9 Level 1 we were somehow ALWAYS out of both floppy disk space and memory.

Came for the effects, and stayed for the presentation on what they learned over the course of four years of building it.

Just found this and honestly, it better than my old home, HN! Keep up the great work!

The Color Basic floating point stuff is actually optimized (or mangled) somewhat for size and does a lot of jumping around which slows it down some. It also has some other weirdness as a result.

This may be inherited from other systems, but it uses a bitwise add and shift algorithm for multiplication which may be slower than an equivalent using mul.

Yeah, I thought it ended with trying to optimize bresenham and just leave it at that.

Haha, fractint is a modern tool?

Hello!! I love working on and programming my mac color classic!

Doesn't the Analytical Engine work count as retrocomputing?

Hello! I not only lurk, I mostly use the RSS feed so I probably don't even show up on site statistics.

I started with a PDP-8e in the old old days and then worked a lot on PDP-10 (DECSYSTEM-20) hardware before eventually landing in Unixland on the VAX 11/750, so I suppose I'm much more of a retro big iron guy.

I did touch some personal computers in the old days, though, including the C64, and I owned an original IBM PC.

Hello from Pennsylvania! Just a lurker, but I enjoy this site immensely. Started programming in BASIC on a c64 and have a soft spot for all things Commodore, but love the articles about workstation machines of that era (PERQ, Symbolics LISP, etc.) that I never got the opportunity to experience in person!

Got to "catgirl ray tube" then stopped reading.

Thank you for the OP for sharing our blogpost. And I agree, I will expand to include more info on the why jungle was a good choice (besides good timing).

The 2nd part of the series will take a brief look at IGS' command structure. If you made a spectrum of protocols based on their commands' "terseness", I imagine NAPLPS would be among the most compact on the left side, RIPscrip might be in the middle, and IGS would be at the right among the least compact.

Code for some of its commands is fairly readable, but others (particularly the `&` Loop command) can be nearly inscrutable.

I'd love to donate some stuff ;)

Can't build a hardware clone of a PC with it. I'm sure your friend knows that.

I had a similar experience. I shelled out for a dual CPU Intel 440fx setup with SCSI disks which was my desktop well into the P3 era, and got migrated to home server where it served for many more years. I think the PPro had the longest useful life of any processor I used.