Comment by ghaff
15 hours ago
Infocom came out of the MIT AI Lab which was very LISP-centric at the time. Depending upon you you listen to, the gaming part was something of a side effect as opposed to the ultimate goal.
15 hours ago
Infocom came out of the MIT AI Lab which was very LISP-centric at the time. Depending upon you you listen to, the gaming part was something of a side effect as opposed to the ultimate goal.
Though I find it fun on the language family tree that the Infocom team's preferred MDL (and thus ZIL) language was surprisingly closer to (and almost prototyping for) the Scheme split despite being "next door" to some of the most LISP legacy work, too.
Yes, they actually planned to release cross-platform applications in addition to games and actually shipped one (1985's database Cornerstone). The problem was 1985 was a bit late for cross-platform business software to be successful; the IBM PC and compatibles had taken over the business market, and having apps in a VM just meant they were a bit slower than native ones.
And they really went all-in on Cornerstone at a time when PC databases, as you say, had really cornered a (shrinking) market. Even MS Access arguably ended up as something of a footnote. Not that text adventure games, even with some graphical chrome, were really a growing market either.