1.
Z Pulsed Power Facility
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Since its refurbishment in October 1996 it has been used primarily as an inertial confinement fusion research facility. Operated by Sandia National Laboratories, it gathers data to aid in computer modeling of nuclear weapons, the Z machine is located at Sandias main site in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Z machine origins can be traced from the Department of Energy need to replicate in a lab environment the fusion reactions of a thermonuclear bomb, to better understand the physics involved. Since the 1970s the DoE had been looking into ways to generate electricity from fusion reactions, since at the time lasers were far from having the required power, the main approach considered was heavy ion fusion. However major advances such as Q-switching and mode-locking made lasers an option, in 1985, the review of DoEs program by the National Academies stated The energy crisis is dormant for the time being. Heavy ion fusion machines were tasked to help military research improve nuclear bombs, the first research at Sandia dates back from 1971 where Gerold Yonas initiated and directed the particle-beam fusion program. In 1985, the PBFA-II was created, Sandia continued to target heavy ion fusion at a slow pace despite the National Academies report. The November 1978 issue of Scientific American carried Yonas first general-public article, in 1996, the US Army published a report on the decommissioning of the Aurora Pulsed Radiation Simulator. This report is useful in understanding ties between nuclear arms testing and inertial fusion energy research, also in 1996, the PBFA-II machine was once again upgraded into PBFA-Z or simply Z machine, described for the first time to the general public on August 1998 in Scientific American. The Z machine uses the well known principle of Z-pinch where the fast discharge of capacitors in a tube causes its collapse towards its centerline, bennet successfully researched the application of Z-pinches to plasma compression. The Z machine layout is cylindrical, on the outside it houses huge capacitors discharging in Marx generators which discharge in about one microsecond. Yonas then uses a system to divide this time by a factor of 10, using the power of water. But this effort was not successful for Heavy Ion Fusion, by lack of sufficient focalization of the beams, despite the high power used. A Russian scientist, Valentin Smirnov, then had the idea of replacing the tube by an array, to fight the azimuthal flow of the current. The space inside the wire array was filled by polystyrene, which helps homogenise the X-ray flux, any country developing thermonuclear weapons has its own Z machine, but those not using water lines had long rising pulses. In the UK, the Magpie machine was situated at the Imperial College under Malcolm Haines, by removing the polystyrene core Sandia was able to obtain a thin one and a half millimetre plasma cord in which 10 million amperes flowed with 90 megabars of pressure. The key attributes of Sandia’s Z machine are its 18 million amperes, the array of tungsten wires is called a liner. In 1999, Sandia tested the idea of nested wire arrays, in 2001, Sandia introduced the Z-Beamlet laser as a tool to better image the compressing pellet
2.
Infocom
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Infocom was a software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced one notable business application, a database called Cornerstone. Activision finally shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom Zork brand, Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002. The name was registered by Oliver Klaeffling of Germany in 2007. The Infocom trademark is held by Pete Hottelets Omni Consumer Products. Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted, generally the program will respond by describing the results of the action, often the contents of a room if the player has moved within the virtual world. The user reads this information, decides what to do, examples include go west or take flashlight. Infocom games were using a roughly LISP-like programming language called ZIL that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine. As the games were based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter. Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game, unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form verb noun, Infocoms parser could understand a wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type open the door, then go west. The company was known for shipping creative props, or feelies. Inspired by Colossal Cave, Marc Blank and Dave Lebling created what was to become the first Infocom game, Zork, Zork I was released originally for the TRS-80 in 1980 and eventually sold more than a million copies across several platforms. Lebling and Blank each authored several games and additional game writers were hired. Other popular and inventive titles included a number of sequels and spinoff games in the Zork series, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, in its first few years of operation, text adventures proved to be a huge revenue stream for the company. Whereas most computer games of the era would achieve success and then suffer a significant drop-off in sales. Employee Tim Anderson said of their situation, It was phenomenal — we had a basement that just printed money. In late 1984, management declined an offer by publisher Simon & Schuster to acquire Infocom for $28 million, in 1993 Computer Gaming World described this era as the Cambridge Camelot, where the Great Underground Empire was formed
3.
Computer architecture
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In computer engineering, computer architecture is a set of rules and methods that describe the functionality, organization, and implementation of computer systems. Some definitions of architecture define it as describing the capabilities and programming model of a computer, in other definitions computer architecture involves instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation. The first documented computer architecture was in the correspondence between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, describing the analytical engine, johnson had the opportunity to write a proprietary research communication about the Stretch, an IBM-developed supercomputer for Los Alamos National Laboratory. Brooks went on to develop the IBM System/360 line of computers. Later, computer users came to use the term in many less-explicit ways, the earliest computer architectures were designed on paper and then directly built into the final hardware form. The discipline of architecture has three main subcategories, Instruction Set Architecture, or ISA. The ISA defines the code that a processor reads and acts upon as well as the word size, memory address modes, processor registers. Microarchitecture, or computer organization describes how a processor will implement the ISA. The size of a computers CPU cache for instance, is an issue that generally has nothing to do with the ISA, system Design includes all of the other hardware components within a computing system. These include, Data processing other than the CPU, such as memory access Other issues such as virtualization, multiprocessing. There are other types of computer architecture, E. g. the C, C++, or Java standards define different Programmer Visible Macroarchitecture. UISA —a group of machines with different hardware level microarchitectures may share a common microcode architecture, pin Architecture, The hardware functions that a microprocessor should provide to a hardware platform, e. g. the x86 pins A20M, FERR/IGNNE or FLUSH. Also, messages that the processor should emit so that external caches can be invalidated, pin architecture functions are more flexible than ISA functions because external hardware can adapt to new encodings, or change from a pin to a message. The term architecture fits, because the functions must be provided for compatible systems, the purpose is to design a computer that maximizes performance while keeping power consumption in check, costs low relative to the amount of expected performance, and is also very reliable. For this, many aspects are to be considered which includes Instruction Set Design, Functional Organization, Logic Design, the implementation involves Integrated Circuit Design, Packaging, Power, and Cooling. Optimization of the design requires familiarity with Compilers, Operating Systems to Logic Design, an instruction set architecture is the interface between the computers software and hardware and also can be viewed as the programmers view of the machine. Computers do not understand high level languages such as Java, C++, a processor only understands instructions encoded in some numerical fashion, usually as binary numbers. Software tools, such as compilers, translate those high level languages into instructions that the processor can understand, besides instructions, the ISA defines items in the computer that are available to a program—e. g
4.
Endianness
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Endianness refers to the sequential order used to numerically interpret a range of bytes in computer memory as a larger, composed word value. It also describes the order of transmission over a digital link. Little-endian format reverses the order of the sequence and stores the least significant byte at the first location with the most significant byte being stored last. The order of bits within a byte can also have endianness, however, both big and little forms of endianness are widely used in digital electronics. As examples, the IBM z/Architecture mainframes use big-endian while the Intel x86 processors use little-endian, the designers chose endianness in the 1960s and 1970s respectively. Big-endian is the most common format in data networking, fields in the protocols of the Internet protocol suite, such as IPv4, IPv6, TCP, for this reason, big-endian byte order is also referred to as network byte order. Little-endian storage is popular for microprocessors, in due to significant influence on microprocessor designs by Intel Corporation. Mixed forms also exist, for instance the ordering of bytes in a 16-bit word may differ from the ordering of 16-bit words within a 32-bit word, such cases are sometimes referred to as mixed-endian or middle-endian. There are also some bi-endian processors that operate in either little-endian or big-endian mode, big-endianness may be demonstrated by writing a decimal number, say one hundred twenty-three, on paper in the usual positional notation understood by a numerate reader,123. The digits are written starting from the left and to the right, with the most significant digit,1 and this is analogous to the lowest address of memory being used first. This is an example of a big-endian convention taken from daily life, the little-endian way of writing the same number, one hundred twenty-three, would place the hundreds-digit 1 in the right-most position,321. A person following conventional big-endian place-value order, who is not aware of this ordering, would read a different number. Endianness in computing is similar, but it applies to the ordering of bytes. The illustrations to the right, where a is a memory address, danny Cohen introduced the terms Little-Endian and Big-Endian for byte ordering in an article from 1980. Computer memory consists of a sequence of storage cells, each cell is identified in hardware and software by its memory address. If the total number of cells in memory is n. Computer programs often use data structures of fields that may consist of data than is stored in one memory cell. For the purpose of this article where its use as an operand of an instruction is relevant, in addition to that, it has to be of numeric type in some positional number system
5.
Interactive fiction
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Interactive fiction, often abbreviated 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 and these works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as Puzzle-free, that focuses on narrative, and text adventures that focus on puzzles. As a commercial product, interactive fiction reached its peak in popularity from 1979 to 1986, due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were ported across all the popular platforms at the time. Today, a stream of new works are produced by an online interactive fiction community. The most famous example of form of printed fiction is the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. The term Interactive fiction is sometimes used wrongly as a synonym for interactive movies or visual novels which are forms of interactive narrative. Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games, the player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Input is usually provided by the player in the form of sentences such as get key or go east. Parsers may vary in sophistication, the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs, later parsers, such as those built on Infocoms ZIL, could understand complete sentences. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as open the red box with the key then go north. This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today, despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered. These games are unique in that they may create a space, where going north from area A takes you to area B. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons. Interactive fiction features two modes of writing, the player input and the game output. As described above, player input is expected to be in command form
6.
Zork
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Zork is one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games, with roots drawn from the original genre game, Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written between 1977 and 1979 using the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10 computer, the authors—Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling—were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group. When Zork was published commercially, it was split up into three games, Zork, The Great Underground Empire - Part I, Zork II, The Wizard of Frobozz, Zork is set in the ruins of an ancient empire lying far underground. The player is an adventurer who is venturing into this dangerous land in search of wealth. The goal is to return from exploring the Great Underground Empire alive and with all treasures needed to complete each adventure, FrobozzCo International is a fictional monopolous conglomerate from the game. FrobozzCo products are littered throughout all Zork games, often to humorous effect, several treasures and locations in Zork suggest that there used to be a large aristocratic family called the Flatheads, which had twelve kings who reigned supreme over the GUE. Some Flatheads are named after figures, for example, in Zork II. The exception to this occurs when the player must use a spray can of grue repellent to navigate dark areas requiring an empty inventory in order to traverse. The original MIT version of Zork combines plot elements from all three of the games, which were made available for commercial sale. The game takes place in the Zork calendar year 948 GUE, the player steps into the deliberately vague role of an adventurer. The game begins near a house in a small, self-contained area. Although the player is given little instruction, the house provides a point of interest. When the player enters the house, it yields a number of intriguing objects, including a brass, battery-powered lantern, an empty case. Beneath the rug a trap door leads down into a dark cellar, the ultimate goal of Zork I is to collect the Twenty Treasures of Zork and install them in the trophy case. Finding the treasures requires solving a variety of such as the navigation of two complex mazes and some intricate manipulations at Flood Control Dam #3. Placing all of the treasures into the trophy case scores the player 350 points and grants the rank of Master Adventurer, an ancient map with further instructions then magically appears in the trophy case. These instructions provide access to a stone barrow, the entrance to the barrow is the end of Zork I and the beginning of Zork II. There are 28 ways for the player to die and it is possible to score all 350 points in 223 moves by exploiting a bug
7.
Byte
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The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of used to encode a single character of text in a computer. The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no standards existed that mandated the size. The de-facto standard of eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte, the international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits, the popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit size. The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper-case letter B by the IEC and IEEE in contrast to the bit, internationally, the unit octet, symbol o, explicitly denotes a sequence of eight bits, eliminating the ambiguity of the byte. It is a respelling of bite to avoid accidental mutation to bit. Early computers used a variety of four-bit binary coded decimal representations and these representations included alphanumeric characters and special graphical symbols. S. Government and universities during the 1960s, the prominence of the System/360 led to the ubiquitous adoption of the eight-bit storage size, while in detail the EBCDIC and ASCII encoding schemes are different. In the early 1960s, AT&T introduced digital telephony first on long-distance trunk lines and these used the eight-bit µ-law encoding. This large investment promised to reduce costs for eight-bit data. The development of microprocessors in the 1970s popularized this storage size. A four-bit quantity is called a nibble, also nybble. The term octet is used to specify a size of eight bits. It is used extensively in protocol definitions, historically, the term octad or octade was used to denote eight bits as well at least in Western Europe, however, this usage is no longer common. The exact origin of the term is unclear, but it can be found in British, Dutch, and German sources of the 1960s and 1970s, and throughout the documentation of Philips mainframe computers. The unit symbol for the byte is specified in IEC 80000-13, IEEE1541, in the International System of Quantities, B is the symbol of the bel, a unit of logarithmic power ratios named after Alexander Graham Bell, creating a conflict with the IEC specification. However, little danger of confusion exists, because the bel is a used unit
8.
Zip (file format)
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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 created in 1989 by Phil Katz, and was first implemented in PKWARE, Inc. s PKZIP utility. The. ZIP format is now supported by many software utilities other than PKZIP, Microsoft has included built-in. ZIP support in versions of Microsoft Windows since 1998. Apple has included built-in. ZIP support in Mac OS X10.3 and later. Most free operating systems have built in support for. ZIP in similar manners to Windows and Mac OS X. ZIP files generally use the file extensions. zip or. ZIP, ZIP is used as a base file format by many programs, usually under a different name. When navigating a file system via an interface, graphical icons representing. ZIP files often appear as a document or other object prominently featuring a zipper. The. ZIP file format was created by Phil Katz of PKWARE and they created the format after PKWARE had a lawsuits filed against them by Systems Enhancement Associates claiming that his archiving products were derivatives of SEAs ARC archiving system. The name zip was suggested by Katzs friend, Robert Mahoney and they wanted to imply that their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time. The earliest known version of. ZIP File Format Specification was first published as part of PKZIP0.9 package under the file APPNOTE. TXT in 1989, the. ZIP file format was released into the public domain. The. ZIP File Format Specification has its own version number, other companies or organizations support the PKWARE specifications at their own pace. The. ZIP file format specification is formally named APPNOTE -. ZIP File Format Specification, several versions of the specification were not published. Specifications of some such as BZIP2 compression, strong encryption specification. The URL of the specification was changed several times on the PKWARE website. A summary of key advances in various versions of the PKWARE specification,2.0, File entries can be compressed with DEFLATE,2.1, Deflate64 compression 4.5, Documented 64-bit zip format. 4.6, BZIP2 compression 5.0, DES, Triple DES, RC2, RC4 supported for encryption 5.2, AES encryption support, expanded list of supported hash, compression, encryption algorithms. 6.3.1, Corrected standard hash values for SHA-256/384/512,6.3.4, Updates the PKWARE, Inc. office address. WinZip, starting with version 12.1, uses the extension. zipx for. ZIP files that use compression methods newer than DEFLATE, specifically, methods BZip, LZMA, PPMd, Jpeg and Wavpack
9.
Activision
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Activision Publishing, Inc. also known as Activision, is an American video game publisher. It was founded on October 1,1979 and was the worlds first independent developer and its first products were cartridges for the Atari 2600 video console system published from July 1980 for the US market and from August 1981 for the international market. As of January 2017, Activision is one of the largest third party video game publishers in the world and was also the top publisher for 2016 in the United States, before Activision, third-party developers did not exist. Software for video game consoles were published exclusively by makers of the systems for which the games were designed, for example, Atari was the only publisher of games for the Atari 2600. This was particularly galling to the developers, as they received financial rewards nor credit for games that sold well. Kaplan, who called the others the best designers for the in the world, recalled that Kassar called the four men towel designers and that anyone can do a cartridge. Crane, Miller, and Whitehead left Atari and founded Activision in October 1979 with former music industry executive Jim Levy and venture capitalist Richard Muchmore, David Crane has said the name Activision was based on Jim Levys idea to combine active and television. The original name proposed for the company was VSync, Inc, unlike Atari, the company credited and promoted game creators along with the games themselves. The steps taken for this included devoting a page to the developer in their instruction manuals and these approaches helped the newly formed company attract experienced talent. In recognition of this step, Kaplan, Levy, Miller, the departure of the four programmers, whose titles made up more than half of Ataris cartridge sales at the time, caused legal action between the two companies not settled until 1982. As the market for game consoles started to decline, Activision branched out, producing titles for home computers. In 1982, Activision released Pitfall. on the Atari 2600, designed and developed by David Crane, it was a huge success. Many clones of the game were introduced, including arcade games. On June 13,1986, Activision purchased struggling text adventure pioneer Infocom, Jim Levy was a big fan of Infocoms titles and wanted the company to remain solvent. About six months after the InfoWedding, Bruce Davis took over as CEO of Activision, Davis was against the merger from the start and was heavy-handed in its management. Five of them accepted this offer, in 1988, Activision began involvement in software besides video games, such as business applications. As a result, Activision changed its name to Mediagenic to better represent all of its activities. After taking over the company, the new management filed for a Chapter 11 reorganization, in the reorganization, Mediagenic merged with The Disc Company with Mediagenic being the surviving company
10.
Compiler
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A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language, with the latter often having a binary form known as object code. The most common reason for converting source code is to create an executable program, the name compiler is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a lower level language. If the compiled program can run on a computer whose CPU or operating system is different from the one on which the compiler runs, more generally, compilers are a specific type of translator. While all programs that take a set of programming specifications and translate them, a program that translates from a low-level language to a higher level one is a decompiler. A program that translates between high-level languages is called a source-to-source compiler or transpiler. A language rewriter is usually a program that translates the form of expressions without a change of language, the term compiler-compiler is sometimes used to refer to a parser generator, a tool often used to help create the lexer and parser. A compiler is likely to many or all of the following operations, lexical analysis, preprocessing, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation. Program faults caused by incorrect compiler behavior can be difficult to track down and work around, therefore. Software for early computers was written in assembly language. The notion of a high level programming language dates back to 1943, no actual implementation occurred until the 1970s, however. The first actual compilers date from the 1950s, identifying the very first is hard, because there is subjectivity in deciding when programs become advanced enough to count as the full concept rather than a precursor. 1952 saw two important advances. Grace Hopper wrote the compiler for the A-0 programming language, though the A-0 functioned more as a loader or linker than the notion of a full compiler. Also in 1952, the first autocode compiler was developed by Alick Glennie for the Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester and this is considered by some to be the first compiled programming language. The FORTRAN team led by John Backus at IBM is generally credited as having introduced the first unambiguously complete compiler, COBOL was an early language to be compiled on multiple architectures, in 1960. In many application domains the idea of using a higher level language quickly caught on, because of the expanding functionality supported by newer programming languages and the increasing complexity of computer architectures, compilers have become more complex. Early compilers were written in assembly language, the first self-hosting compiler – capable of compiling its own source code in a high-level language – was created in 1962 for the Lisp programming language by Tim Hart and Mike Levin at MIT. Since the 1970s, it has become practice to implement a compiler in the language it compiles
11.
Computer Gaming World
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Computer Gaming World was an American computer game magazine published between 1981 and 2006. In 1979 Russell Sipe left the Southern Baptist Convention ministry, a fan of computer games, he realized in spring 1981 there was no magazine dedicated to computer games. Although Sipe had no publishing experience, he formed Golden Empire Publications in June, the first issue appeared in November, at about the same as rivals Electronic Games and Softline. Early bi-monthly issues were typically 40-50 pages in length, written in a style, including submissions by game designers such as Joel Billings, Dan Bunten. As well, early covers were not always related to the magazines contents. In January/February 1986 CGW increased its publication cycle to nine times a year, and the staff included popular writers such as Scorpia, Charles Ardai. CGW survived the game crash of 1983, which badly hurt the market. In autumn 1987 CGW introduced a quarterly newsletter called Computer Game Forum, the newsletter never became popular, only two issues were published before it was cancelled. Some of CGFs content became part of CGW, which became a monthly, the magazine went through significant expansion starting in 1991, with growing page counts reaching 196 pages by its 100th issue, in November 1992. During that same year, Johnny Wilson became editor-in-chief, although Sipe remained as Publisher, in 1993, he sold the magazine to Ziff Davis but continued on as Publisher until 1995. The magazine kept growing through the 1990s, with the December 1997 issue weighing in at 500 pages, in 1999, Wilson left the magazine and George Jones became editor-in-chief, at a time when print magazines were struggling with the growing popularity of the Internet. Jones was replaced by Jeff Green in 2002, on August 2,2006, Ziff Davis and Microsoft jointly announced that Computer Gaming World would be replaced with Games for Windows, The Official Magazine. The final CGW-labeled issue was November 2006, for a total of 268 published editions, simultaneously with the release of the final CGW issue, Ziff Davis announced the availability of the CGW Archive. The Archive features complete copies of the first 100 issues of CGW, as well as the 2 CGF issues, the Archive was created by Stephane Racle, of the Computer Gaming World Museum, and is available in PDF format. Every issue was processed through Optical Character Recognition, which enabled the creation of a 3+ million word master index, although Ziff Davis has taken its CGW Archive site offline, the magazines can be downloaded from the Computer Gaming World Museum. On April 8,2008, 1UP Network announced the print edition of Games for Windows, The Official Magazine had ceased, CGW featured reviews, previews, news, features, letters, strategy, and columns dealing with computer games. While console games are occasionally touched on, these are primarily the territory of CGWs sister magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, tom vs. Bruce sometimes featured a guest appearance by Erik Wolpaw, formerly of Old Man Murray. For many years, CGW never assigned scores to reviews, preferring to let readers rate their favorite games through a monthly poll, scores were finally introduced in 1994
12.
Inform
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Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-code or Glulx virtual machines, versions 1 through 5 were released between 1993 and 1996. Around 1996, Nelson rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6, over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7, a new language based on principles of natural language. All versions of Inform generate files in Z-code from source code and these files can then be run by any Z-code interpreter – that is, by any program which properly implements the Z-code virtual machine specification. The Z-machine was originally developed by Infocom in 1979 for their interactive fiction titles, because there is at least one such interpreter for nearly every major and minor platform, this means that the same Z-code file can be run on a multitude of platforms with no alterations. Starting with Inform 6.3, released February 29,2004, early release of Inform 7 did not support Glulx, but in August 2006 Glulx support was released. Inform was originally created by Graham Nelson in 1993, in 1996 Nelson rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6. Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a language for writing interactive fiction. The name Inform also refers to the Inform programming language that the compiler understands, the Inform compiler generates files for the Z-machine or Glulx from Inform 6 source code. The Inform programming language is object-oriented and procedural, a key element of the language is objects. Objects are maintained in a tree which lists the parent–child relationships between objects. Since the parent–child relationship is used to represent location, an object which is the parent of another object is often said to hold it. Objects can be moved throughout the tree, all objects can hold other objects, so a livingroom object might hold an insurancesaleman object which is holding a briefcase object which contains the insurancepaperwork object. In early versions of Inform, objects were different from the notion of objects from object-oriented programming, later versions added support for class definitions and allowed objects to be members of classes. Objects and classes can inherit from multiple classes, Interactive fiction games typically contain many unique objects. Because of this, many objects in Inform do not inherit from any class, however, objects very frequently have attributes that are recognized by the Inform library. In other languages this would normally be implemented via inheritance, here is a simple example of Inform 6 source code
13.
IPhone
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IPhone is a line of smartphones designed and marketed by Apple Inc. They run Apples iOS mobile operating system, the first generation iPhone was released on June 29,2007, the most recent iPhone model is the iPhone 7, which was unveiled at a special event on September 7,2016. The user interface is built around the devices multi-touch screen, including a virtual keyboard, the iPhone has Wi-Fi and can connect to cellular networks. Other functionality, such as games, reference works, and social networking. As of January 2017, Apples App Store contained more than 2.2 million applications available for the iPhone, Apple has released ten generations of iPhone models, each accompanied by one of the ten major releases of the iOS operating system. The iPhone 5 featured a taller, 4-inch display and Apples newly introduced Lightning connector, in 2013, Apple released the 5S with improved hardware and a fingerprint reader, and the lower-cost 5C, a version of the 5 with colored plastic casings instead of metal. They were followed by the larger iPhone 6, with models featuring 4.7 and 5. 5-inch displays.5 mm headphone jack found on previous phones. The iPhones commercial success has been credited with reshaping the smartphone industry, the original iPhone was one of the first phones to use a design featuring a slate format with a touchscreen interface. Almost all modern smartphones have replicated this style of design, in the US, the iPhone holds the largest share of the smartphone market. As of late 2015, the iPhone had a 43. 6% market share, followed by Samsung, LG, Apple CEO Steve Jobs steered the original focus away from a tablet and towards a phone. Apple created the device during a collaboration with Cingular Wireless at the time—at an estimated development cost of US$150 million over thirty months. Apple rejected the design by committee approach that had yielded the Motorola ROKR E1, among other deficiencies, the ROKR E1s firmware limited storage to only 100 iTunes songs to avoid competing with Apples iPod nano. Jobs unveiled the iPhone to the public on January 9,2007, the passionate reaction to the launch of the iPhone resulted in sections of the media dubbing it the Jesus phone. Following this successful release in the US, the first generation iPhone was made available in the UK, France, and Germany in November 2007, on July 11,2008, Apple released the iPhone 3G in twenty-two countries, including the original six. Apple released the iPhone 3G in upwards of eighty countries and territories. Apple announced the iPhone 3GS on June 8,2009, along with plans to release it later in June, July, many would-be users objected to the iPhones cost, and 40% of users had household incomes over US$100,000. The back of the original first generation iPhone was made of aluminum with a black plastic accent, the iPhone 3G and 3GS feature a full plastic back to increase the strength of the GSM signal. The iPhone 3G was available in an 8 GB black model, the iPhone 3GS was available in both colors, regardless of storage capacity
14.
Zork I
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Zork is one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games, with roots drawn from the original genre game, Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written between 1977 and 1979 using the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10 computer, the authors—Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling—were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group. When Zork was published commercially, it was split up into three games, Zork, The Great Underground Empire - Part I, Zork II, The Wizard of Frobozz, Zork is set in the ruins of an ancient empire lying far underground. The player is an adventurer who is venturing into this dangerous land in search of wealth. The goal is to return from exploring the Great Underground Empire alive and with all treasures needed to complete each adventure, FrobozzCo International is a fictional monopolous conglomerate from the game. FrobozzCo products are littered throughout all Zork games, often to humorous effect, several treasures and locations in Zork suggest that there used to be a large aristocratic family called the Flatheads, which had twelve kings who reigned supreme over the GUE. Some Flatheads are named after figures, for example, in Zork II. The exception to this occurs when the player must use a spray can of grue repellent to navigate dark areas requiring an empty inventory in order to traverse. The original MIT version of Zork combines plot elements from all three of the games, which were made available for commercial sale. The game takes place in the Zork calendar year 948 GUE, the player steps into the deliberately vague role of an adventurer. The game begins near a house in a small, self-contained area. Although the player is given little instruction, the house provides a point of interest. When the player enters the house, it yields a number of intriguing objects, including a brass, battery-powered lantern, an empty case. Beneath the rug a trap door leads down into a dark cellar, the ultimate goal of Zork I is to collect the Twenty Treasures of Zork and install them in the trophy case. Finding the treasures requires solving a variety of such as the navigation of two complex mazes and some intricate manipulations at Flood Control Dam #3. Placing all of the treasures into the trophy case scores the player 350 points and grants the rank of Master Adventurer, an ancient map with further instructions then magically appears in the trophy case. These instructions provide access to a stone barrow, the entrance to the barrow is the end of Zork I and the beginning of Zork II. There are 28 ways for the player to die and it is possible to score all 350 points in 223 moves by exploiting a bug
15.
Interpreter (computing)
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An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution, parse the source code and perform its behavior directly. Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation and immediately execute this, explicitly execute stored precompiled code made by a compiler which is part of the interpreter system. Early versions of Lisp programming language and Dartmouth BASIC would be examples of the first type, perl, Python, MATLAB, and Ruby are examples of the second, while UCSD Pascal is an example of the third type. Source programs are compiled ahead of time and stored as machine independent code, some systems, such as Smalltalk and contemporary versions of BASIC and Java may also combine two and three. Interpreters of various types have also constructed for many languages traditionally associated with compilation, such as Algol, Fortran, Cobol. The terms interpreted language or compiled language signify that the implementation of that language is an interpreter or a compiler. A high level language is ideally an abstraction independent of particular implementations, the first interpreted high-level language was Lisp. Lisp was first implemented in 1958 by Steve Russell on an IBM704 computer, Russell had read John McCarthys paper, and realized that the Lisp eval function could be implemented in machine code. The result was a working Lisp interpreter which could be used to run Lisp programs, or more properly, Programs written in a high level language are either directly executed by some kind of interpreter or converted into machine code by a compiler for the CPU to execute. While compilers generally produce machine code directly executable by computer hardware and this is basically the same machine specific code but augmented with a symbol table with names and tags to make executable blocks identifiable and relocatable. Compiled programs will typically use building blocks kept in a library of object code modules. A linker is used to combine library files with the file of the application to form a single executable file. The object files that are used to generate an executable file are thus often produced at different times, thus, both compilers and interpreters generally turn source code into tokens, both may generate a parse tree, and both may generate immediate instructions. However, a program still runs much faster, under most circumstances, in part because compilers are designed to optimize code. This is especially true for simpler high level languages without dynamic data structures, checks, when the program is loaded for execution. Historically, most interpreter-systems have had an editor built in. This is becoming more common also for compilers, although some prefer to use an editor of their choice. During the software development cycle, programmers make frequent changes to source code, the larger the program, the longer the wait
16.
Apple II series
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Introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire on April 16,1977, the Apple II was among the first successful personal computers, it launched the Apple company into a successful business. Throughout the years, a number of models were sold, with the most popular model remaining relatively little changed into the 1990s, while primarily an 8-bit computer, by mid-run a 16-bit model was introduced. It was first sold on June 10,1977, by the end of production in 1993, somewhere between five and six million Apple II series computers had been produced. The Apple II was one of the longest running mass-produced home computer series, the Apple II became one of several recognizable and successful computers during the 1980s and early 1990s, although this was mainly limited to the USA. The original Apple II operating system was in ROM along with Integer BASIC, programs were entered, then saved and loaded on cassette tape. When the Disk II was implemented in 1978 by Steve Wozniak, the final and most popular version of this software was Apple DOS3.3. Some commercial Apple II software booted directly and did not use standard DOS formats and this discouraged the copying or modifying of the software on the disks and improved loading speed. Apple DOS was superseded by ProDOS, which supported a hierarchical filesystem, with an optional third-party Z80-based expansion card the Apple II could boot into the CP/M operating system and run WordStar, dBase II, and other CP/M software. At the height of its evolution, towards the late 1980s, by 1992, the platform had 16-bit processing capabilities, a mouse-driven graphical user interface, and graphics and sound capabilities far beyond the original. At its peak, it was an industry with its associated community of third-party developers and retailers. The Apple IIGS was sold until the end of 1992, the last II-series Apple in production, total Apple II sales for its 14-year run were about 6 million units, with the peak occurring in 1983 when 1 million were sold. The Apple II was designed to more like a home appliance than a piece of electronic equipment. The Apple II had color and high-resolution graphics modes, sound capabilities, the Apple II was targeted for the masses rather than just hobbyists and engineers, it also influenced most of the microcomputers that followed it. Unlike preceding home microcomputers, it was sold as a consumer appliance rather than as a kit. VanLOVEs Apple Handbook and The Apple Educators Guide by Gerald VanDiver, the Apple dealer network used this book to emphasize the growing software developer base in education and personal use. The Apple II series had a built into the motherboard shell. An upgrade kit was later to house the motherboard of an Apple IIGS in an Apple IIe case. The Apple II case was durable enough, according to a 1981 Apple ad, early II-series models were usually designated Apple ][ plus
17.
TRS-80
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The TRS-80 Micro Computer System is a desktop microcomputer launched in 1977 and sold by Tandy Corporation through their Radio Shack stores. The name is an abbreviation of Tandy/Radio Shack, Z-80 microprocessor and it was one of the earliest mass-produced personal computers. By 1979, the TRS-80 had the largest selection of software in the microcomputer market, until 1982, the TRS-80 was the best-selling PC line, outselling the Apple II series by a factor of 5 according to one analysis. In mid-1980, the broadly compatible TRS-80 Model III was released, the Model I was discontinued shortly after, primarily due to stricter FCC regulations on the radio-frequency interference it caused in surrounding electronics. In 1983, the Model III was in turn succeeded by the compatible Model 4, in the mid-1970s, Tandy Corporations Radio Shack division was a successful American chain of more than 3,000 electronics stores. After buyer Don French purchased a MITS Altair kit computer, he began designing his own, although the design did not impress Roach, the idea of selling a microcomputer did. When the two men visited National Semiconductor in California in mid-1976, Steve Leiningers expertise on the SC/MP microprocessor impressed them, the company envisioned a kit, but Leininger persuaded the others that because too many people cant solder, a preassembled computer would be better. Many opposed the project, one executive told French, Dont waste my time—we cant sell computers, as the popularity of CB radio—at one point comprising more than 20% of Radio Shacks sales—declined, however, the company sought new products. In February 1977 they showed their prototype, running a simple tax-accounting program, to Charles Tandy, after the demonstration Tandy revealed that he had already leaked the computers existence to the press, so the project was approved. MITS sold 1,000 Altairs in February 1975, and was selling 10,000 a year. Leininger and French suggested that Radio Shack could sell 50,000 computers, Roach persuaded Tandy to agree to build 3, 500—the number of Radio Shack stores—so that each store could use a computer for inventory purposes if they did not sell. Having spent less than US$150,000 on development, Radio Shack announced the TRS-80 at a New York City press conference on August 3,1977. It cost US$399, or US$599 with a 12 monitor and a Radio Shack tape recorder as datacassette storage, the company hoped that the new computer would help Radio Shack sell higher-priced products, and improve its schlocky image among customers. Despite the internal skepticism, Radio Shack aggressively entered the market, the company advertised The $599 personal computer as the most important, useful, exciting, electronic product of our time. The company announced plans to be selling by Christmas a range of peripherals and software for the TRS-80, began shipping computers by September, the first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December. The line won popularity with hobbyists, home users, and small-businesses, Tandy Corporations leading position in what Byte Magazine called the 1977 Trinity had much to do with Tandys retailing the computer through more than 3,000 of its Radio Shack storefronts. Notable features of the original TRS-80 included its full-stroke QWERTY keyboard, small size, its floating-point BASIC programming language, a monitor. The pre-release price was US$500 and a US$50 deposit was required, by 1980 InfoWorld described Radio Shack as the dominant supplier of small computers
18.
ZX Spectrum
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The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd. It was manufactured in Dundee, Scotland, in the now closed Timex factory, the Spectrum was among the first mainstream-audience home computers in the UK, similar in significance to the Commodore 64 in the USA. Licensing deals and clones followed, and earned Clive Sinclair a knighthood for services to British industry, the Commodore 64, Dragon 32, Oric-1 and Atmos, BBC Microcomputer and later the Amstrad CPC range were rivals to the Spectrum in the UK market during the early 1980s. Over 24,000 software titles have been released since the Spectrums launch, in 2014, a Bluetooth keyboard modelled on the Spectrum was announced. The Spectrum is based on a Zilog Z80 A CPU running at 3.5 MHz, the original model has 16 KB of ROM and either 16 KB or 48 KB of RAM. Hardware design was by Richard Altwasser of Sinclair Research, and the appearance was designed by Sinclairs industrial designer Rick Dickinson. Video output is through an RF modulator and was designed for use with contemporary portable television sets, the image resolution is 256×192 with the same colour limitations. To conserve memory, colour is stored separate from the bitmap in a low resolution, 32×24 grid overlay. In practice, this means that all pixels of an 8x8 character block share one foreground colour, Altwasser received a patent for this design. An attribute consists of a foreground and a colour, a brightness level and a flashing flag which. This scheme leads to what was dubbed colour clash or attribute clash and this became a distinctive feature of the Spectrum, meaning programs, particularly games, had to be designed around this limitation. Other machines available around the time, for example the Amstrad CPC or the Commodore 64. The Commodore 64 used colour attributes in a way, but a special multicolour mode, hardware sprites. Sound output is through a beeper on the machine itself, capable of producing one channel with 10 octaves, software was later available that could play two channel sound. The machine includes an expansion bus edge connector and 3.5 mm audio in/out ports for the connection of a recorder for loading and saving programs. The ear port can drive headphones and the mic port provides line level audio out which could be amplified, the machines Sinclair BASIC interpreter is stored in ROM and was written by Steve Vickers on contract from Nine Tiles Ltd. The Spectrums chiclet keyboard is marked with BASIC keywords, for example, pressing G when in programming mode would insert the BASIC command GO TO. The ZX Spectrum character set was expanded from that of the ZX81, Spectrum BASIC included extra keywords for the more advanced display and sound, and supported multi-statement lines
19.
Palm OS
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Palm OS is a discontinued mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc. for personal digital assistants in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of applications for personal information management. Later versions of the OS have been extended to support smartphones, several other licensees have manufactured devices powered by Palm OS. Following Palms purchase of the Palm trademark, the licensed version from ACCESS was renamed Garnet OS. In 2007, ACCESS introduced the successor to Garnet OS, called Access Linux Platform and in 2009, Palm OS was originally developed under the direction of Jeff Hawkins at Palm Computing, Inc. Palm was later acquired by U. S. Robotics Corp. which in turn was bought by 3Com. In January 2002, Palm set up a wholly owned subsidiary to develop and license Palm OS, PalmSource was then spun off from Palm as an independent company on October 28,2003. Palm became a licensee of Palm OS, no longer in control of the operating system. In September 2005, PalmSource announced that it was being acquired by ACCESS, in December 2006, Palm gained perpetual rights to the Palm OS source code from ACCESS. With this Palm can modify the operating system as needed without paying further royalties to ACCESS. Together with the May 2005 acquisition of rights to the Palm brand name. As a consequence, on January 25,2007, ACCESS announced a change to their current Palm OS operating system. Palm OS is a mobile operating system. Palm OS versions earlier than 5.0 run on Motorola/Freescale DragonBall processors, from version 5.0 onwards, Palm OS runs on ARM architecture-based processors. Included with the OS is also a set of standard applications, manufacturers are free to implement different features of the OS in their devices or even add new features. This version history describes the officially licensed version from Palm/PalmSource/ACCESS, all versions prior to Palm OS5 are based on top of the AMX68000 kernel licensed from KADAK Products Ltd. While this kernel is capable of multitasking, the terms
20.
Game Boy
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It is the first handheld console in the Game Boy line and was created by Satoru Okada and Nintendo Research & Development 1. This same team, led by Gunpei Yokoi at the time, is credited with designing the Game & Watch series as well as popular games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Redesigned versions were released in 1996 and 1998 in the form of Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Light, the Game Boy is Nintendos second handheld system following the Game & Watch series introduced in 1980 and it combined features from both the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game & Watch. It was either bought as a unit or bundled with the puzzle game Tetris. During its early lifetime, the Game Boy mainly competed with Segas Game Gear, Ataris Lynx, the Game Boy beat its rivals and became a tremendous success. The Game Boy and its successor, the Game Boy Color, have sold over 118 million units worldwide, upon the Game Boys release in the United States, it sold its entire shipment of one million units within a few weeks. The Game Boy and Game Boy Color were discontinued in the early 2000s in favor of the subsequent Game Boy Advance, the Game Boy has four operation buttons labeled A, B, SELECT, and START, as well as a directional pad. There is a control dial on the right side of the device. At the top of the Game Boy, a sliding on-off switch, the on-off switch includes a physical lockout to prevent users from either inserting or removing a cartridge while the unit is switched on. Nintendo recommends users leave a cartridge in the slot to prevent dust, the Game Boy also contains optional input and/or output connectors. On the left side of the system is an external 3. 5mm x 1. 35mm DC power supply jack that allows users to use a rechargeable battery pack or AC adapter instead of four AA batteries. The Game Boy requires 6 V DC of at least 150 mA, a 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack is located on the bottom side of the unit which allows users to listen to the audio with the bundled headphones or external speakers. The right-side of the device offers a port which allows a user to connect to another Game Boy system via a link cable, the port can also be used to connect a Game Boy Printer. The link cable was designed for players to play head-to-head two-player games such as in Tetris. However, game developer Satoshi Tajiri would later use the cable technology as a method of communication. CPU Custom 8-bit Sharp LR35902 at 4.19 MHz and this processor is similar to an Intel 8080 in that none of the registers introduced in the Z80 are present. However, some of the Z80s instruction set enhancements over the 8080, still other instructions are unique to this particular flavor of 8080/Z80 CPU. The IC also contains integrated sound generation, the unit only has one speaker, but headphones provide stereo sound Display, Reflective STN LCD160 ×144 pixels Frame Rate, Approx
21.
Executable
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These instructions are traditionally machine code instructions for a physical CPU. Executable code is used to describe sequences of instructions that do not necessarily constitute an executable file, for example. Several object files are linked to create the executable, object files, executable or not, are typically in a container format, such as Executable and Linkable Format. This structures the generated code, for example dividing it into sections such as the. text. data. In order to be executed by the system, a file must conform to the systems Application Binary Interface. For example, in ELF, the point is specified in the header in the e_entry field. In the GCC this field is set by the based on the _start symbol. For C, this is done by linking in the crt0 object, Executable files thus normally contain significant additional machine code beyond that directly generated from the specific source code. In some cases it is desirable to omit this, for example for embedded systems development or simply to understand how compilation, linking, comparison of executable file formats EXE File Format at What Is
22.
Operating system
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An operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. All computer programs, excluding firmware, require a system to function. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones, the dominant desktop operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 83. 3%. MacOS by Apple Inc. is in place, and the varieties of Linux is in third position. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputing sectors, other specialized classes of operating systems, such as embedded and real-time systems, exist for many applications. A single-tasking system can run one program at a time. Multi-tasking may be characterized in preemptive and co-operative types, in preemptive multitasking, the operating system slices the CPU time and dedicates a slot to each of the programs. Unix-like operating systems, e. g. Solaris, Linux, cooperative multitasking is achieved by relying on each process to provide time to the other processes in a defined manner. 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows used cooperative multi-tasking, 32-bit versions of both Windows NT and Win9x, used preemptive multi-tasking. Single-user operating systems have no facilities to distinguish users, but may allow multiple programs to run in tandem, a distributed operating system manages a group of distinct computers and makes them appear to be a single computer. The development of networked computers that could be linked and communicate with each other gave rise to distributed computing, distributed computations are carried out on more than one machine. When computers in a work in cooperation, they form a distributed system. The technique is used both in virtualization and cloud computing management, and is common in large server warehouses, embedded operating systems are designed to be used in embedded computer systems. They are designed to operate on small machines like PDAs with less autonomy and they are able to operate with a limited number of resources. They are very compact and extremely efficient by design, Windows CE and Minix 3 are some examples of embedded operating systems. A real-time operating system is a system that guarantees to process events or data by a specific moment in time. A real-time operating system may be single- or multi-tasking, but when multitasking, early computers were built to perform a series of single tasks, like a calculator. Basic operating system features were developed in the 1950s, such as resident monitor functions that could run different programs in succession to speed up processing
23.
Macintosh
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The Macintosh (/ˈmækᵻntɒʃ/ MAK-in-tosh, is a series of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. Steve Jobs introduced the original Macintosh computer on January 24,1984 and this was the companys first mass-market personal computer featuring an integral graphical user interface and mouse. This first model was renamed to Macintosh 128k for uniqueness amongst a populous family of subsequently updated models which are also based on Apples same proprietary architecture. Since 1998, Apple has largely phased out the Macintosh name in favor of Mac, Macintosh systems still found success in education and desktop publishing and kept Apple as the second-largest PC manufacturer for the next decade. In the 1990s, improvements in the rival Wintel platform, notably with the introduction of Windows 3.0, then Windows 95, gradually took market share from the more expensive Macintosh systems. The performance advantage of 68000-based Macintosh systems was eroded by Intels Pentium, even after a transition to the superior PowerPC-based Power Macintosh line in 1994, the falling prices of commodity PC components and the release of Windows 95 saw the Macintosh user base decline. In 1998, after the return of Steve Jobs, Apple consolidated its multiple consumer-level desktop models into the all-in-one iMac G3, since their transition to Intel processors in 2006, the complete lineup is entirely based on said processors and associated systems. Its current lineup comprises three desktops, and three laptops and its Xserve server was discontinued in 2011 in favor of the Mac Mini and Mac Pro. Apple also develops the operating system for the Mac, currently macOS version 10.12 Sierra, Macs are currently capable of running non-Apple operating systems such as Linux, OpenBSD, and Microsoft Windows with the aid of Boot Camp or third-party software. Apple does not license macOS for use on computers, though it did license previous versions of the classic Mac OS through their Macintosh clone program from 1995 to 1997. The Macintosh project was begun in 1979 by Jef Raskin, an Apple employee who envisioned an easy-to-use, in 1978 Apple began to organize the Apple Lisa project, aiming to build a next-generation machine similar to an advanced Apple III or the yet-to-be-introduced IBM PC. In 1979, Steve Jobs learned of the work on graphical user interfaces taking place at Xerox PARC. He arranged a deal in which Xerox received Apple stock options in return for which Apple would license their designs, the basic layout of the Lisa was largely complete by 1982, at which point Jobs continual suggestions for improvements led to him being kicked off the project. At the same time that the Lisa was becoming a GUI machine in 1979, the design at that time was for a low-cost, easy-to-use machine for the average consumer. Raskin was authorized to start hiring for the project in September 1979 and his initial team would eventually consist of himself, Howard, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, and Bud Tribble. Smiths design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, which production of the board significantly more cost-efficient. Though there were no memory slots, its RAM was expandable to 512 kB by means of soldering sixteen IC sockets to accept 256 kb RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips. The final products screen was a 9-inch, 512x342 pixel monochrome display, burrels innovative design, combining the low production cost of an Apple II with the computing power of Lisas Motorola 68000 CPU, began to receive Jobs attentions
24.
Linux
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Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open-source software development and distribution. The defining component of Linux is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17,1991 by Linus Torvalds, the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to describe the operating system, which has led to some controversy. Linux was originally developed for computers based on the Intel x86 architecture. Because of the dominance of Android on smartphones, Linux has the largest installed base of all operating systems. Linux is also the operating system on servers and other big iron systems such as mainframe computers. It is used by around 2. 3% of desktop computers, the Chromebook, which runs on Chrome OS, dominates the US K–12 education market and represents nearly 20% of the sub-$300 notebook sales in the US. Linux also runs on embedded systems – devices whose operating system is built into the firmware and is highly tailored to the system. This includes TiVo and similar DVR devices, network routers, facility automation controls, televisions, many smartphones and tablet computers run Android and other Linux derivatives. The development of Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free, the underlying source code may be used, modified and distributed—commercially or non-commercially—by anyone under the terms of its respective licenses, such as the GNU General Public License. Typically, Linux is packaged in a known as a Linux distribution for both desktop and server use. Distributions intended to run on servers may omit all graphical environments from the standard install, because Linux is freely redistributable, anyone may create a distribution for any intended use. The Unix operating system was conceived and implemented in 1969 at AT&Ts Bell Laboratories in the United States by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, first released in 1971, Unix was written entirely in assembly language, as was common practice at the time. Later, in a key pioneering approach in 1973, it was rewritten in the C programming language by Dennis Ritchie, the availability of a high-level language implementation of Unix made its porting to different computer platforms easier. Due to an earlier antitrust case forbidding it from entering the computer business, as a result, Unix grew quickly and became widely adopted by academic institutions and businesses. In 1984, AT&T divested itself of Bell Labs, freed of the legal obligation requiring free licensing, the GNU Project, started in 1983 by Richard Stallman, has the goal of creating a complete Unix-compatible software system composed entirely of free software. Later, in 1985, Stallman started the Free Software Foundation, by the early 1990s, many of the programs required in an operating system were completed, although low-level elements such as device drivers, daemons, and the kernel were stalled and incomplete. Linus Torvalds has stated that if the GNU kernel had been available at the time, although not released until 1992 due to legal complications, development of 386BSD, from which NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD descended, predated that of Linux. Torvalds has also stated that if 386BSD had been available at the time, although the complete source code of MINIX was freely available, the licensing terms prevented it from being free software until the licensing changed in April 2000
25.
DOS
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None of these systems were officially named DOS, and indeed DOS is a general term for disk operating system. MS-DOS dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, and Microsoft Windows, still ran on top of it until about 2001, dozens of other operating systems also use the acronym DOS, including DOS/360 from 1966. Others are Apple DOS, Apple ProDOS, Atari DOS, Commodore DOS, TRSDOS, see List of DOS operating systems § Other operating systems. IBM PC DOS and its predecessor, 86-DOS, resembled Digital Researchs CP/M—the dominant disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080, DOS instead ran on Intel 8086 16-bit processors. Starting with MS-DOS1.28 and PC DOS2.0 the operating system incorporated various features inspired by Xenix, when IBM introduced the IBM PC, built with the Intel 8088 microprocessor, they needed an operating system. Seeking an 8088-compatible build of CP/M, IBM initially approached Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, IBM was sent to Digital Research, and a meeting was set up. However, the negotiations for the use of CP/M broke down, Digital Research wished to sell CP/M on a royalty basis, while IBM sought a single license. Digital Research founder Gary Kildall refused, and IBM withdrew, Gates in turn approached Seattle Computer Products. There, programmer Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80, the system was initially named QDOS, before being made commercially available as 86-DOS. Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000 and this became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981. Within a year Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to over 70 other companies, Microsoft later required the use of the MS-DOS name, with the exception of the IBM variant. IBM continued to develop their version, PC DOS, for the IBM PC, Digital Research became aware that an operating system similar to CP/M was being sold by IBM, and threatened legal action. IBM responded by offering an agreement, they would give PC consumers a choice of PC DOS or CP/M-86, side-by-side, CP/M cost almost $200 more than PC DOS, and sales were low. CP/M faded, with MS-DOS and PC DOS becoming the operating system for PCs. Microsoft originally sold MS-DOS only to original equipment manufacturers, one major reason for this was that not all early PCs were 100% IBM PC compatible. DOS was structured such that there was a separation between the specific device driver code and the DOS kernel. Microsoft provided an OEM Adaptation Kit which allowed OEMs to customize the device driver code to their particular system, by the early 1990s, most PCs adhered to IBM PC standards so Microsoft began selling MS-DOS in retail with MS-DOS5.0. In the mid-1980s Microsoft developed a version of DOS
26.
Microsoft Windows
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Microsoft Windows is a metafamily of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. It consists of families of operating systems, each of which cater to a certain sector of the computing industry with the OS typically associated with IBM PC compatible architecture. Active Windows families include Windows NT, Windows Embedded and Windows Phone, defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows 10 Mobile is an active product, unrelated to the defunct family Windows Mobile. Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20,1985, Microsoft Windows came to dominate the worlds personal computer market with over 90% market share, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984. Apple came to see Windows as an encroachment on their innovation in GUI development as implemented on products such as the Lisa. On PCs, Windows is still the most popular operating system, however, in 2014, Microsoft admitted losing the majority of the overall operating system market to Android, because of the massive growth in sales of Android smartphones. In 2014, the number of Windows devices sold was less than 25% that of Android devices sold and this comparison however may not be fully relevant, as the two operating systems traditionally target different platforms. As of September 2016, the most recent version of Windows for PCs, tablets, smartphones, the most recent versions for server computers is Windows Server 2016. A specialized version of Windows runs on the Xbox One game console, Microsoft, the developer of Windows, has registered several trademarks each of which denote a family of Windows operating systems that target a specific sector of the computing industry. It now consists of three operating system subfamilies that are released almost at the time and share the same kernel. Windows, The operating system for personal computers, tablets. The latest version is Windows 10, the main competitor of this family is macOS by Apple Inc. for personal computers and Android for mobile devices. Windows Server, The operating system for server computers, the latest version is Windows Server 2016. Unlike its clients sibling, it has adopted a strong naming scheme, the main competitor of this family is Linux. Windows PE, A lightweight version of its Windows sibling meant to operate as an operating system, used for installing Windows on bare-metal computers. The latest version is Windows PE10.0.10586.0, Windows Embedded, Initially, Microsoft developed Windows CE as a general-purpose operating system for every device that was too resource-limited to be called a full-fledged computer. The following Windows families are no longer being developed, Windows 9x, Microsoft now caters to the consumers market with Windows NT. Windows Mobile, The predecessor to Windows Phone, it was a mobile operating system
27.
C (programming language)
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C was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs, and used to re-implement the Unix operating system. C has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute since 1989, C is an imperative procedural language. Therefore, C was useful for applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language. Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage cross-platform programming, a standards-compliant and portably written C program can be compiled for a very wide variety of computer platforms and operating systems with few changes to its source code. The language has become available on a wide range of platforms. In C, all code is contained within subroutines, which are called functions. Function parameters are passed by value. Pass-by-reference is simulated in C by explicitly passing pointer values, C program source text is free-format, using the semicolon as a statement terminator and curly braces for grouping blocks of statements. The C language also exhibits the characteristics, There is a small, fixed number of keywords, including a full set of flow of control primitives, for, if/else, while, switch. User-defined names are not distinguished from keywords by any kind of sigil, There are a large number of arithmetical and logical operators, such as +, +=, ++, &, ~, etc. More than one assignment may be performed in a single statement, function return values can be ignored when not needed. Typing is static, but weakly enforced, all data has a type, C has no define keyword, instead, a statement beginning with the name of a type is taken as a declaration. There is no function keyword, instead, a function is indicated by the parentheses of an argument list, user-defined and compound types are possible. Heterogeneous aggregate data types allow related data elements to be accessed and assigned as a unit, array indexing is a secondary notation, defined in terms of pointer arithmetic. Unlike structs, arrays are not first-class objects, they cannot be assigned or compared using single built-in operators, There is no array keyword, in use or definition, instead, square brackets indicate arrays syntactically, for example month. Enumerated types are possible with the enum keyword and they are not tagged, and are freely interconvertible with integers. Strings are not a data type, but are conventionally implemented as null-terminated arrays of characters. Low-level access to memory is possible by converting machine addresses to typed pointers
28.
Unix
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Among these is Apples macOS, which is the Unix version with the largest installed base as of 2014. Many Unix-like operating systems have arisen over the years, of which Linux is the most popular, Unix was originally meant to be a convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmer users. The system grew larger as the system started spreading in academic circles, as users added their own tools to the system. Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing configuration and these concepts are collectively known as the Unix philosophy. By the early 1980s users began seeing Unix as a universal operating system. Under Unix, the system consists of many utilities along with the master control program. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the division between user space and kernel space, the microkernel concept was introduced in an effort to reverse the trend towards larger kernels and return to a system in which most tasks were completed by smaller utilities. In an era when a standard computer consisted of a disk for storage and a data terminal for input and output. However, modern systems include networking and other new devices, as graphical user interfaces developed, the file model proved inadequate to the task of handling asynchronous events such as those generated by a mouse. In the 1980s, non-blocking I/O and the set of inter-process communication mechanisms were augmented with Unix domain sockets, shared memory, message queues, and semaphores. In microkernel implementations, functions such as network protocols could be moved out of the kernel, Multics introduced many innovations, but had many problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not by the aims and their last researchers to leave Multics, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna, decided to redo the work on a much smaller scale. The name Unics, a pun on Multics, was suggested for the project in 1970. Peter H. Salus credits Peter Neumann with the pun, while Brian Kernighan claims the coining for himself, in 1972, Unix was rewritten in the C programming language. Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are referred to as Research Unix. In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to faculty at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science, UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson was instrumental in negotiating the terms of this license. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to adoption of Unix by commercial startups, including Sequent, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX. In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4, in the 1990s, Unix-like systems grew in popularity as Linux and BSD distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers
29.
RISC OS
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RISC OS /rɪskoʊˈɛs/ is a computer operating system originally designed by Acorn Computers Ltd in Cambridge, England. First released in 1987, it was designed to run on the ARM chipset. RISC OS takes its name from the RISC architecture supported, between 1987 and 1998, RISC OS was bundled with every ARM-based Acorn computer model. These included the Acorn Archimedes range, Acorns R line of computers, RiscPC, A7000 and also prototype models such as the Acorn NewsPad, a version of the OS was also used in Oracles Network Computer and compatible systems. After the break-up of Acorn in 1998, development of the OS was forked and separately continued by several companies, including RISCOS Ltd, Pace Micro Technology, since then, it has been bundled with a number of ARM-based desktop computers such as the Iyonix and A9home. As of March 2017, the OS remains forked and is developed by RISCOS Ltd. Most recent stable versions run on the ARMv3/ARMv4 RiscPC, the ARMv5 Iyonix, ARMv7 Cortex-A8 processors, there is a development version for the Raspberry Pi. SD card images have been available for downloading free of charge to Raspberry Pi 1 &2 users with a full graphical user interface version. RISC OS was originally released in 1987 as Arthur 1.20, the next version, Arthur 2, became RISC OS2 and was made available in April 1989. RISC OS3.00 was released with the A5000 in 1991, by 1996 RISC OS had been shipped on over 500,000 systems. Acorn officially halted work on the OS in January 1999, renaming themselves Element 14, meanwhile, Element 14 had also kept a copy of RISC OS3.8 in house, which they developed into NCOS for use in set-top boxes. In 2000, Element 14 sold RISC OS to a company called Pace Micro Technology, in May 2001, RISCOS Ltd launched RISC OS Select, a subscription scheme allowing users access to the latest RISC OS4 updates. These upgrades are released as soft-loadable ROM images, separate to the ROM where the boot OS is stored, Select 1 was shipped in May 2002, with Select 2 following in November 2002 and the final release of Select 3 in June 2004. In the same month, RISC OS4.39, dubbed RISC OS Adjust, was released, RISC OS Adjust was a culmination of all the Select Scheme updates to date, released as a physical set of replaceable ROMs for the RiscPC and A7000 series of machines. Meanwhile, in October 2002, Castle Technology released the Acorn clone Iyonix PC and this ran a 32-bit variant of RISC OS, known as RISC OS5. RISC OS5 is an evolution of RISC OS based upon the NCOS work done by Pace. The following year, Castle Technology bought RISC OS from Pace for an undisclosed sum, in October 2006, Castle announced a source sharing license plan for elements of RISC OS5. This Shared Source Initiative is managed by RISC OS Open Limited, versions of RISC OS run or have run on the following hardware
30.
Macintosh operating systems
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The family of Macintosh operating systems developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the Classic Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded Mac OS in 1996, was preinstalled on every Macintosh until 2002, noted for its ease of use, it was also criticized for its lack of modern technologies compared to its competitors. The current Mac operating system is macOS, originally named Mac OS X until 2012, the current macOS is preinstalled with every Mac and is updated annually. It is the basis of Apples current system software for its devices, iOS, watchOS. Apples effort to expand upon and develop a replacement for its classic Mac OS in the 1990s led to a few cancelled projects, code named Star Trek, Taligent, the Macintosh is credited with having popularized this concept. The classic Mac OS is the original Macintosh operating system that was introduced in 1984 alongside the first Macintosh and remained in primary use on Macs through 2001. Apple released the original Macintosh on January 24,1984, its system software was partially based on the Lisa OS and the Xerox PARC Alto computer. It was originally named System Software, or simply System, Apple rebranded it as Mac OS in 1996 due in part to its Macintosh clone program that ended a year later, Mac OS is characterized by its monolithic system. Nine major versions of the classic Mac OS were released, the name Classic that now signifies the system as a whole is a reference to a compatibility layer that helped ease the transition to Mac OS X. Although the system was marketed as simply version 10 of Mac OS. Precursors to the release of Mac OS X include OpenStep, Apples Rhapsody project. MacOS makes use of the BSD codebase and the XNU kernel, the first desktop version of the system was released on March 24,2001, supporting the Aqua user interface. Since then, several more versions adding newer features and technologies have been released, since 2011, new releases have been offered on an annual basis. It was followed by several more official server-based releases, server functionality has instead been offered as an add-on for the desktop system since 2011. The first version of the system was ready for use in February 1988, in 1988, Apple released its first Unix-based OS, A/UX, which was a Unix operating system with the Mac OS look and feel. It was not very competitive for its time, due in part to the crowded Unix market, A/UX had most of its success in sales to the U. S. government, where POSIX compliance was a requirement that Mac OS could not meet. The Macintosh Application Environment was a software package introduced by Apple in 1994 that allowed users of certain Unix-based computer workstations to run Apple Macintosh application software, MAE used the X Window System to emulate a Macintosh Finder-style graphical user interface
31.
IOS
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IOS is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the system that presently powers many of the companys mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad. It is the second most popular operating system globally after Android. IPad tablets are also the second most popular, by sales, originally unveiled in 2007 for the iPhone, iOS has been extended to support other Apple devices such as the iPod Touch and the iPad. As of January 2017, Apples App Store contains more than 2.2 million iOS applications,1 million of which are native for iPads and these mobile apps have collectively been downloaded more than 130 billion times. The iOS user interface is based upon direct manipulation, using multi-touch gestures, interface control elements consist of sliders, switches, and buttons. Internal accelerometers are used by applications to respond to shaking the device or rotating it in three dimensions. Apple has been praised for incorporating thorough accessibility functions into iOS, enabling users with vision. Major versions of iOS are released annually, the current version, iOS10, was released on September 13,2016. In iOS, there are four layers, the Core OS, Core Services, Media. In 2005, when Steve Jobs began planning the iPhone, he had a choice to either shrink the Mac, forstall was also responsible for creating a software development kit for programmers to build iPhone apps, as well as an App Store within iTunes. The operating system was unveiled with the iPhone at the Macworld Conference & Expo on January 9,2007, and released in June of that year. At the time of its unveiling in January, Steve Jobs claimed, iPhone runs OS X and runs applications, but at the time of the iPhones release. Initially, third-party native applications were not supported, Steve Jobs reasoning was that developers could build web applications through the Safari web browser that would behave like native apps on the iPhone. In October 2007, Apple announced that a native Software Development Kit was under development, on March 6,2008, Apple held a press event, announcing the iPhone SDK. The iOS App Store was opened on July 10,2008 with an initial 500 applications available.2 million in January 2017, as of March 2016,1 million apps are natively compatible with the iPad tablet computer. These apps have collectively been downloaded more than 130 billion times, App intelligence firm Sensor Tower has estimated that the App Store will reach 5 million apps by the year 2020. On September 5,2007, Apple released the iPod Touch, Apple also sold more than one million iPhones during the 2007 holiday season
32.
User interface
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The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. Examples of this concept of user interfaces include the interactive aspects of computer operating systems, hand tools, heavy machinery operator controls. The design considerations applicable when creating user interfaces are related to or involve such disciplines as ergonomics and psychology. Generally, the goal of user interface design is to produce a user interface makes it easy, efficient. This generally means that the needs to provide minimal input to achieve the desired output. Other terms for user interface are man–machine interface and when the machine in question is a computer human–computer interface, the user interface or human–machine interface is the part of the machine that handles the human–machine interaction. Membrane switches, rubber keypads and touchscreens are examples of the part of the Human Machine Interface which we can see. In complex systems, the interface is typically computerized. The term human–computer interface refers to this kind of system, in the context of computing the term typically extends as well to the software dedicated to control the physical elements used for human-computer interaction. The engineering of the interfaces is enhanced by considering ergonomics. The corresponding disciplines are human factors engineering and usability engineering, which is part of systems engineering, tools used for incorporating human factors in the interface design are developed based on knowledge of computer science, such as computer graphics, operating systems, programming languages. Nowadays, we use the graphical user interface for human–machine interface on computers. There is a difference between a user interface and an interface or a human–machine interface. A human-machine interface is typically local to one machine or piece of equipment, an operator interface is the interface method by which multiple equipment that are linked by a host control system is accessed or controlled. The system may expose several user interfaces to serve different kinds of users, for example, a computerized library database might provide two user interfaces, one for library patrons and the other for library personnel. The user interface of a system, a vehicle or an industrial installation is sometimes referred to as the human–machine interface. HMI is a modification of the original term MMI, in practice, the abbreviation MMI is still frequently used although some may claim that MMI stands for something different now. Another abbreviation is HCI, but is commonly used for human–computer interaction
33.
Instant messaging
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Instant messaging is a type of online chat that offers real-time text transmission over the Internet. A LAN messenger operates in a way over a local area network. Short messages are typically transmitted bi-directionally between two parties, when each user chooses to complete a thought and select send, some IM applications can use push technology to provide real-time text, which transmits messages character by character, as they are composed. More advanced instant messaging can add file transfer, clickable hyperlinks, Voice over IP, non-IM types of chat include multicast transmission, usually referred to as chat rooms, where participants might be anonymous or might be previously known to each other. Instant messaging systems tend to facilitate connections between specified known users, depending on the IM protocol, the technical architecture can be peer-to-peer or client-server. Instant messaging is a set of technologies used for text-based communication between two or more participants over the Internet or other types of networks. Of importance is that online chat and instant messaging differ from other such as email due to the perceived quasi-synchrony of the communications by the users. Some systems permit messages to be sent to users not then logged on, IM allows effective and efficient communication, allowing immediate receipt of acknowledgment or reply. However IM is basically not necessarily supported by transaction control, in many cases, instant messaging includes added features which can make it even more popular. For example, users may see each other via webcams, or talk directly for free over the Internet using a microphone, many applications allow file transfers, although they are usually limited in the permissible file-size. It is usually possible to save a text conversation for later reference, Instant messages are often logged in a local message history, making it similar to the persistent nature of emails. Initially, some of these systems were used as notification systems for services like printing, as networks developed, the protocols spread with the networks. Some of these used a peer-to-peer protocol, while others required peers to connect to a server, the Zephyr Notification Service was invented at MITs Project Athena in the 1980s to allow service providers to locate and send messages to users. Parallel to instant messaging were early online chat facilities, the earliest of which was Talkomatic on the PLATO system, during the bulletin board system phenomenon that peaked during the 1980s, some systems incorporated chat features which were similar to instant messaging, Freelancin Roundtable was one prime example. The first such general-availability commercial online service was the CompuServe CB Simulator in 1980, created by CompuServe executive Alexander Sandy Trevor in Columbus. Early instant messaging programs were primarily real-time text, where appeared as they were typed. This includes the Unix talk command line program, which was popular in the 1980s, some BBS chat programs also used a similar interface. Modern implementations of real-time text also exist in instant messengers, such as AOLs Real-Time IM as an optional feature, (Quantum Link later became America Online and made AOL Instant Messenger
34.
SCUMM
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Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion is a video game engine developed at Lucasfilm Games, later renamed LucasArts, to ease development on their first graphic adventure game Maniac Mansion. It was subsequently used as the engine for later LucasArts adventure games and this also allowed the games script and data files to be cross-platform, i. e. re-used across various platforms. SCUMM is also a host for embedded game engines such as the Interactive MUsic Streaming Engine, the INteractive Streaming ANimation Engine, CYST, FLEM, the original version was coded by Ron Gilbert in 1987, with later versions enhanced by Aric Wilmunder and various others. This is a language that provided ground breaking coding techniques. Were the first to be utilized, the nature of SCUMM emerged from the background of most of the early programmers at LucasArts, including Wilmunder, having been programmers for mainframe computers. This concept informed the idea of a language that would be cross-platform. SCUMM was developed to be a tool that converted human-readable commands into byte-sized tokens that then would be read by an interpreter program that presented the game to the player. For example, the SCUMM command walk dr-fred to laboratory-door would be tokenized to a 4-byte command. They did not want to have details about a game hard-coded into the script. The scripts included the ability to multitask, such as having background actors enact behavior while waiting for foreground actions to complete, the combined tools enabled for rapid prototyping of a game. Scripters could work with preliminary character and background art drawn by the artists to hone their scripts while providing feedback to the artists, the SCUMM program was responsible for tokenizing the scripts and gathering all other assets as a package. The reusable interpreter was called SPUTM, the SCUMM Presentation Utility which was renamed on shipment of the game to the name of the games executable, SPUTM would interpret the scripts, load assets from disc, and handle the other user interactions with the game. SPUTM was not actually trademarked, but according to Wilmunder, they wanted to name it after another bodily fluid, SCUMM was subsequently reused in many later LucasArts adventure games being both updated and rewritten several times. Other tools and engines were developed alongside SCUMM to aid in development, SPIT was used to manage text fonts on different parts of the screen. FLEM was used to define a specific room, track objects within it, MMUCAS was used with FLEM to compile a room and its objects into one file that would enable the scripters to make rapid changes without having to recompile the rooms description. BYLE and subsequently CYST were used for animations and scaling. For the game Full Throttle, the worked to integrate SCUMM with the INSANE animation engine that had formerly been developed for Star Wars. Internally, much of the workings of SCUMM were undocumented, as Wilmunder believed that it was simple to learn
35.
Maniac Mansion
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Maniac Mansion is a 1987 graphic adventure video game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It follows teenage protagonist Dave Miller as he attempts to rescue his girlfriend from a mad scientist, the player uses a point-and-click interface to guide Dave and two of his six playable friends through the scientists mansion while solving puzzles and avoiding dangers. Gameplay is non-linear, and the game must be completed in different ways based on the choice of characters. Initially released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II, Maniac Mansion was Lucasfilm Games first self-published product, the game was conceived in 1985 by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who sought to tell a comedic story based on horror film and B-movie clichés. They mapped out the project as a game before coding commenced. While earlier adventure titles had relied on command lines, Gilbert disliked such systems, to speed up production, he created a game engine called SCUMM, which was used in many later LucasArts titles. After its release, Maniac Mansion was ported to several platforms, a port for the Nintendo Entertainment System had to be reworked heavily, in response to complaints by Nintendo of America that the game was inappropriate for children. Maniac Mansion was critically acclaimed, reviewers lauded its graphics, cutscenes, animation, writer Orson Scott Card praised it as a step toward computer games a valid storytelling art. It influenced numerous graphic adventure titles, and its point-and-click interface became a feature in the genre. The games success solidified Lucasfilm as a rival to adventure game studios such as Sierra On-Line. In 1990, Maniac Mansion was adapted into a television series of the same name, written by Eugene Levy. A sequel to the game, entitled Day of the Tentacle, was released in 1993, Maniac Mansion is a graphic adventure game in which the player uses a point-and-click interface to guide characters through a two-dimensional game world and to solve puzzles. Fifteen action commands, such as Walk To and Unlock, may be selected by the player from a menu on the lower half. The player starts the game by choosing two out of six characters to accompany protagonist Dave Miller, each character possesses unique abilities, for example, Syd and Razor can play musical instruments, while Bernard can repair appliances. The game may be completed with any combination of characters, but, since many puzzles are solvable only by certain characters, Maniac Mansion features cutscenes, a word coined by Ron Gilbert, that interrupt gameplay to advance the story and inform the player about offscreen events. The game takes place in the mansion of the fictional Edison family, Dr. Fred, a mad scientist, Nurse Edna, his wife, living with the Edisons are two large, disembodied tentacles, one purple and the other green. The intro sequence shows that a sentient meteor crashed near the mansion twenty years earlier, it brainwashed the Edisons, the game begins as Dave Miller prepares to enter the mansion to rescue his girlfriend, Sandy Pantz, who was kidnapped by Dr. Fred. With the exception of the tentacle, the mansions inhabitants are hostile
36.
LucasArts
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LucasArts Entertainment Company, LLC is an American video game publisher and licensor. Until 2013, it was also a game developer. LucasArts is best known for its graphic adventure games, as well as based on the Star Wars. Its headquarters are located in San Francisco, California and it was founded in May 1982 by George Lucas as Lucasfilm Games, the video game development group of his film company, Lucasfilm. Lucas initially served as the companys chairman, during a 1990 reorganization of Lucas companies, the Lucasfilm Games division was renamed LucasArts. LucasArts was acquired by The Walt Disney Company through the acquisition of its parent company Lucasfilm in 2012, on April 3,2013, Disney halted all internal development at LucasArts and laid off most of its staff. However, LucasArts remained open so that it could retain its function as a licensor, development of games based on the Star Wars license will be performed by Electronic Arts, through an exclusive license, for the core gaming market. Disney Interactive Studios retained the ability to develop, and LucasArts retained the ability to license the franchise for the gaming market. Development of video based upon other Lucasfilm properties will now be assumed by Disney Interactive Studios or licensed to third parties. The company was founded in May 1982 as the game development group of Lucasfilm Limited. Lucas wanted his company to branch out into areas of entertainment. The Lucasfilm Games Group originally cooperated with Atari, which helped fund the video game groups founding, the first results of this collaboration were unique action games like Ballblazer in 1984, and Rescue on Fractalus. In 1984, they were released for the Atari 5200 under the Lucasfilm Games label, versions for home computers were not released until 1985, by publisher Epyx. Lucasfilms next two games were Koronis Rift and The Eidolon and their first games were only developed by Lucasfilm, and a publisher would distribute the games. Atari published their games for Atari systems, Activision and Epyx would do their computer publishing, Maniac Mansion was the first game to be published and developed by Lucasfilm Games. The early charter of Lucasfilm Games was to make experimental, innovative, Habitat, an early online role-playing game, was one such title. It was only released as a beta test in 1986 by Quantum Link, Quantum Link could not provide the bandwidth at the time to support the game, so the full Habitat was never released outside of the beta test. However, Lucasfilm Games recouped the cost of development by releasing a sized down version called Club Caribe in 1988, Lucasfilm later licensed the software to Fujitsu, who released it in Japan as Fujitsu Habitat in 1990
37.
Zork II
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Zork is one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games, with roots drawn from the original genre game, Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written between 1977 and 1979 using the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10 computer, the authors—Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling—were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group. When Zork was published commercially, it was split up into three games, Zork, The Great Underground Empire - Part I, Zork II, The Wizard of Frobozz, Zork is set in the ruins of an ancient empire lying far underground. The player is an adventurer who is venturing into this dangerous land in search of wealth. The goal is to return from exploring the Great Underground Empire alive and with all treasures needed to complete each adventure, FrobozzCo International is a fictional monopolous conglomerate from the game. FrobozzCo products are littered throughout all Zork games, often to humorous effect, several treasures and locations in Zork suggest that there used to be a large aristocratic family called the Flatheads, which had twelve kings who reigned supreme over the GUE. Some Flatheads are named after figures, for example, in Zork II. The exception to this occurs when the player must use a spray can of grue repellent to navigate dark areas requiring an empty inventory in order to traverse. The original MIT version of Zork combines plot elements from all three of the games, which were made available for commercial sale. The game takes place in the Zork calendar year 948 GUE, the player steps into the deliberately vague role of an adventurer. The game begins near a house in a small, self-contained area. Although the player is given little instruction, the house provides a point of interest. When the player enters the house, it yields a number of intriguing objects, including a brass, battery-powered lantern, an empty case. Beneath the rug a trap door leads down into a dark cellar, the ultimate goal of Zork I is to collect the Twenty Treasures of Zork and install them in the trophy case. Finding the treasures requires solving a variety of such as the navigation of two complex mazes and some intricate manipulations at Flood Control Dam #3. Placing all of the treasures into the trophy case scores the player 350 points and grants the rank of Master Adventurer, an ancient map with further instructions then magically appears in the trophy case. These instructions provide access to a stone barrow, the entrance to the barrow is the end of Zork I and the beginning of Zork II. There are 28 ways for the player to die and it is possible to score all 350 points in 223 moves by exploiting a bug
38.
Zork III
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Zork is one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games, with roots drawn from the original genre game, Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written between 1977 and 1979 using the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10 computer, the authors—Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling—were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group. When Zork was published commercially, it was split up into three games, Zork, The Great Underground Empire - Part I, Zork II, The Wizard of Frobozz, Zork is set in the ruins of an ancient empire lying far underground. The player is an adventurer who is venturing into this dangerous land in search of wealth. The goal is to return from exploring the Great Underground Empire alive and with all treasures needed to complete each adventure, FrobozzCo International is a fictional monopolous conglomerate from the game. FrobozzCo products are littered throughout all Zork games, often to humorous effect, several treasures and locations in Zork suggest that there used to be a large aristocratic family called the Flatheads, which had twelve kings who reigned supreme over the GUE. Some Flatheads are named after figures, for example, in Zork II. The exception to this occurs when the player must use a spray can of grue repellent to navigate dark areas requiring an empty inventory in order to traverse. The original MIT version of Zork combines plot elements from all three of the games, which were made available for commercial sale. The game takes place in the Zork calendar year 948 GUE, the player steps into the deliberately vague role of an adventurer. The game begins near a house in a small, self-contained area. Although the player is given little instruction, the house provides a point of interest. When the player enters the house, it yields a number of intriguing objects, including a brass, battery-powered lantern, an empty case. Beneath the rug a trap door leads down into a dark cellar, the ultimate goal of Zork I is to collect the Twenty Treasures of Zork and install them in the trophy case. Finding the treasures requires solving a variety of such as the navigation of two complex mazes and some intricate manipulations at Flood Control Dam #3. Placing all of the treasures into the trophy case scores the player 350 points and grants the rank of Master Adventurer, an ancient map with further instructions then magically appears in the trophy case. These instructions provide access to a stone barrow, the entrance to the barrow is the end of Zork I and the beginning of Zork II. There are 28 ways for the player to die and it is possible to score all 350 points in 223 moves by exploiting a bug
39.
Enchanter (video game)
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Enchanter is a 1983 interactive fiction computer game written by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling and published by Infocom. It belongs to the genre and was the first fantasy game published by Infocom after the Zork trilogy. The game had a parser that understood over 700 words, making it the most advanced interactive fiction game of its time, Krill, an incredibly powerful evil warlock, is spreading chaos and destruction. None of the experienced members of the Circle of Enchanters dare to attempt to stop him. In desperation, the player, a novice Enchanter with only a few weak spells in his book, is sent in hopes that Krill will either fail to detect him or dismiss him as harmless. More powerful spells can be found on scrolls hidden in various locations and this game features an innovative new spell system based partially on Ursula K. Le Guins Earthsea series and partially Dungeons and Dragons Vancian spell system, many of the spell names, such as FROTZ and GNUSTO, are taken from MIT hacker slang of the time, others are various pop cultural references or anagrams. Frotz, a modern open-source interpreter for Infocom games draws its name from a spell in Enchanter, another spell, Blorb, provides the name for a standard wrapper for interactive fiction multimedia resources. Several other IF tools have also named after spells from the series. In the game Zork III, a device slowly cycles through scenes from each of the Zork games as a number is displayed above it, a depiction of the sacrificial altar from the then-unreleased Enchanter appeared under the number IV. Creators Dave Lebling and Marc Blank decided during the design that the magic system made it a standalone product. It became the first game of its own trilogy, usually referred to as The Enchanter Trilogy, the others in the series are 1984s Sorcerer and 1985s Spellbreaker. Robin Wayne Baileys 1989 novel Enchanter is a rather than a novelisation. Infocom rated Enchanter as Standard in difficulty, Enchanter is the only game in the Zork universe where lurking grues, although they still exist, are not mentioned by name, the game doesnt even know the word grue. There are differences in this remake, the game recognizes verb commands typed in kana or Latin alphabet. For convenience, some of the most common verb commands can be accessed by pressing a corresponding button and this remake also helps the player to interact with the environment by displaying a list of objects after the player has typed a command. Also, unlike the original, the remake contains enhanced graphics, every location has a background picture. Released in September,1983, Infocom sold about 50,000 copies of Enchanter by the end of 1984, computer Gaming Worlds Scorpia praised the game as typically excellent and up to the standards expected of Infocom games
