The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog

by homarp • 7 years ago

82 21 7 years ago

h2odragon2• 7 years ago

People make good points about how digital media is ephemeral (many then go on to assure us that this will lead to the Fall of Civilization).

Then there's delightful efforts like this.

This example gives me faith that the important things will be copied and recopied as necessary, and the ephemeral things that are lost might not be all that lost.

xfitm3• 7 years ago

The slippery slope is the definition of important.

h2odragon2• 7 years ago

A definition of important is "what people feel is worth recopying". Always been that way hasn't it?

criddell• 7 years ago

People make good points about how digital media is ephemeral

I wonder what will happen to all of the digital-only movies and tv shows being made today. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and others are all making stuff that you can't buy on physical media and so if they decide that something shouldn't be available anymore, then it won't be.

cosmodisk• 7 years ago

They will eventually disappear. Even though all of them are heavily pirated, they don't stay on people's hard drives for ever. The metadata about them may actually stay alive longer, i.e. IMDB, fan forums,etc.

vipref• 7 years ago

I wonder what will happen to all of the digital-only movies and tv shows being made today

Why do you feel digital media can't be preserved?

There are DVD renditions of old media. Cassettes were popular at one time only to be supplanted by newer technologies and it will be the same for current media formats.

To cite an example, I used to listen to cassette music while growing up and was hugely fond of them (Walkman, anybody?) That was then supplanted by digital mp3 players, and now streaming over the internet.

If something is worth preserving, newer technology will make sure it is!

That is just my opinion for you.

wellpast• 7 years ago

Is IPFS the answer to this?

brokenmachine2• 7 years ago

Maybe? Someone still needs to host the data. I often see IPFS brought up in this context, but it's not a panacea.

techslave2• 7 years ago

I believe that the historical value of these documents to the IF community outweighs the rights of the legal owner.

I couldn’t agree less.

techslave2• 7 years ago

downvotes? laughable. i guess it’s also fine if texas steals copyright and can’t be touched because “sovereign”. it’s the same justification here. don’t worry about copyright because “history”.

thievery plain and simple.

tedshroyer2• 7 years ago

    curl https://eblong.com/infocom/ | grep href | grep -v http | cut -d '"' -f2 | awk '{print "curl -O https://eblong.com/infocom/" $0}' | bash -x

m4632• 7 years ago

that is very clever.

I usually do these sorts of things in a loop, sometimes like:

    <something> | while read f
    do
      sleep 10
      <do-something-with> "$f"
    done

brokenmachine2• 7 years ago

Better make sure there's no spaces in that <something> or that will break.

I usually use this:

  <something> | tr '\n' '\000' | xargs -0 -n1 command

The tr will convert newlines to nulls. Otherwise you need to change the IFS.

Just commenting because this was a bugbear of mine when getting started in bash.

tzakrajs• 7 years ago

wget has a recursive mode which is perfect for archival

dmolony• 7 years ago

Will this overwrite files that have the same name but are in different directories?

tedshroyer2• 7 years ago

I think it would overwrite, but it seems like all the names were unique

feydaykyn• 7 years ago

There's a great podcast about infocom games which is very funny to listen to even if you don't know/play the games (that's my case)

http://monsterfeet.com/grue/

Eaten By A Grue, the Infocom podcast

A podcast about Infocom games, text adventures, and interactive fiction Hosted by Kevin Savetz and Carrington Vanston.

andrewstuart• 7 years ago

It would be great if this was on github - individual sites like this disappear and the history is lost.

m4632• 7 years ago

oh how wonderful... this led to another site:

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html

which had the original vax/vms Dungeon (zork) that I played when young. It actually referenced MEMQ like I remember:

    <DEFINE FEEL-FREE (LOSER)
     <TELL "FEEL FREE, CHOMPER!">
     <MEMQ ......
    The rest is, alas, unintelligible (as were the implementers).

glangdale• 7 years ago

It's not obsessively complete until they have Cornerstone - the database software that the whole company was actually meant to be about (weird, but true).

The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog

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