An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect

http://porkrind.org/missives/dungeon-zork-map-in-duplicity/

by __david__ • 14 years ago

115 26 14 years ago

aidenn0• 14 years ago

I forgot how big the minicomputer version was. They ended up splitting the CPM version into several games. Probably couldn't fit the whole thing on a single cassette.

james2vegas• 14 years ago

s/cassette/floppy disk/

primitur2• 14 years ago

IMHO, this was one of the lost magical things about tapes .. you could just endlessly add lots of them as you needed them, seamlessly even in those days. I recall loading rather large stuff, tape at a time, as an old-school operator in-training and so on ..

unimpressive2• 14 years ago

If you look at Neo's bookshelf at the beginning of the matrix, the books are on cybernetics and skeptical hypothesizes. (At least as far as I could tell the last time I saw it.)

A subtle touch that probably went unnoticed by most of the audience.

baddox• 14 years ago

"Simulacra and Simulation" was the one I remember.

thristian• 14 years ago

Specifically, that's the hollowed-out book Neo keeps his mini-discs of illegal software in. So the title is not just a reference to the movie's themes, it's also literally true: it's not a functional book, since it's hollowed out, it's a simulation of a book.

Interestingly, "Simulacra and Simulation" is not a title that was invented for the movie: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0472065211

astangl• 14 years ago

I still have that issue around here somewhere. Makes me feel like an old fart when I read stuff like this, or see my old typewriter in a museum.

rocky1138• 14 years ago

Do we know who the set designer was? Can we get him/her to chime in?

jwallaceparker• 14 years ago

Yes. That information is in the article.

The set decorator was George DeTitta Jr.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0221890/

Ogre• 14 years ago

Oddly enough I've got a 3rd level link to him (a set decorator sharing his name, what are the odds its not him?) on Linkedin, but apparently you can't send such a person an email without paying Linkedin for the privilege. Is it worth $20 (/month) to send Mr DeTitta a message he might not even read? I'm going to say no, sorry HN.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

He may have just approved the item, but he might be a start to tracking it down.

The map should have been "cleared" (ie permission from the rights holder obtained), but if they thought it was a real hand drawn image created for the film, they may have missed it.

Side note, imdb lists three additional people in the art department with his surname. The power of having a long career and two oscar noms, I guess.

jtheory• 14 years ago

I was going to suggest the magical spell to summon a person on the internet -- say their name three times in a high pagerank location with your eyes closed, of course -- but it only works for people who haven't yet tired of googling themselves.

In this case, the guy has 50 titles to his credit, some of them quite big blockbusters, so I suspect he's not going to notice. Maybe he'll have a nephew or other connection who'll let him know his input is urgently needed on a matter of great importance.

showerst• 14 years ago

I've seen this map on the web a number of times, so the designer may have found it there instead of the from the print magazine.

Cool touch though!

kristopher• 14 years ago

Isn't it amazing how fast our brains can lock-in and drill-down. For something that might have might only been viewable in a few frames, the author was able to recall a small subset from over 30 years ago.

Will computers ever have the IO bandwidth to compete with the human brain?

indiecore• 14 years ago

>Will computers ever have the IO bandwidth to compete with the human brain?

Probably, it's just a matter of time.

dsil• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, I cut out an image of just the map from the screenshot posted, and gave it to google reverse-image-search, and it did NOT match it to a map of Zork. It just returned a bunch of similarly colored images.

njharman• 14 years ago

What do you define as a computer? a single cpu, one rack unit, a cluster? What is your definition of "compete"?

Computers already beat humans at math, memory, chess, and many other things. Certainly believe Google's clusters have the IO to compete with humans at searching and filtering.

rhplus• 14 years ago

Perhaps the set designer just searched for "handdrawn map" and filtered to "Large" images. For me, Google is returning that Dungeon map as the 2nd result.

lloeki• 14 years ago

Occam's razor tells me this might just be right. The map is even 6th without 'Large'.

primitur2• 14 years ago

Its Google-od, looking through the Mirror.

lnanek2• 14 years ago

Reminds me of a book I just read, Ready Player One: http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-ebook/dp/B004J4WKUQ/r...

The entire thing is like references to stuff like this, heh.

quink• 14 years ago

I read this through without having read any reviews or even the cover, and I was pleasantly surprised as to how good a read it was. Not the plot, that was absolutely meh, nor the ticking of pop reference and stereotypes boxes that the author quite clearly wanted to get done. But despite fact that it was an unabashedly predictable and pedestrian plot, it was a pretty awesome book.

It got a 3/5 on my scale, on which 95% of fiction books get 1 star and 4% get 2 stars, which means it's worth reading for almost everybody, is a fun enough read, and while it won't change the world should definitely be in the top 100 popular books of last year. Read it. It got 4.27 on Goodreads, which also testifies as to how good it is.

unimpressive2• 14 years ago

So what are some four and five star books?

bcl• 14 years ago

Gallery of all the Infocom games - http://gallery.guetech.org/

I thought the maps were in there as well, but I can't find them ATM. I still have my parchment maps from Zork II and III. I loaned the Zork I map to a girl in HS and never saw it again :/

peteforde• 14 years ago

This sounds like a job for Reddit.

bobinator30• 14 years ago

here's the original hand-drawn version of the cave that i used to use http://bit.ly/S5SRIK

An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect

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