Comment by ChristopherDrum
6 days ago
Interesting to know, thanks. My intention with that comment was in pondering about vms distributed commercially in the home market, which I don't think I made clear enough in the post. :/
6 days ago
Interesting to know, thanks. My intention with that comment was in pondering about vms distributed commercially in the home market, which I don't think I made clear enough in the post. :/
What's remarkable about Infocom's z-machine is the level of sophistication and polish vs the intended application, maybe unsurprising coming from MIT graduates with access to a PDP-10 as a development platform. Otherwise the use of virtual machines was, maybe not common, but not unusual.
* TinyBasic (1975) was specified (and sometimes implemented) as a VM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC
* Apple Pascal (1979) was a UCSD Pascal system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pascal
* The COSMAC VIP computer/console's (1977) games were programmed in CHIP-8, a VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8
* Scott Adams' text adventures (1978+) used an application-specific VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_International
* Wozniak's SWEET16 contained in Apple II Integer Basic (1977) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
* If you count Forth as a VM, it was pretty common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)
You must have done little research to remember those. I knew all but two. (COmSAC and Sweet16).
I wonder if the wikipedia articles are lucky enough to be good...
Blank and Berez were definitely thinking about p-machines when they designed the Z machine, and there is a hat tip in the 1980 Creative Computing article describing its inner workings.
[1]: https://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm
And the founders were AFAIK mostly looking at games as a testbed for bigger and better things—a mindset that unfortunately led to the Cornerstone database.
There were a bunch of minicomputer and the Unix operating systems that would arguable have been better than Microsoft’s entries. But it just wasn’t in the DNA of those companies to sell a consumer-priced operating systems.