Zork On A Rotary Phone

Here’s a project that certainly deserves to be shown in a trophy case: Zork running over a rotary phone on a TDD device. If you have any memory of the days before hyper-accelerated-water-cooled graphics cards, adventure games were big. Before graphical adventures like the “Monkey Island” or “King’s Quest” series were popular, the big adventures were text-based. The king of text adventures was the “Zork” series, which was born in the MIT mainframes and was brought into the commercial world by Infocom. One guy using the name Ulysses has decided to create a truly retro twist to playing the game. He used a TDD (Telecommunications Device for the Deaf), a modem, and a rotary phone. (You remember rotary phones, right? The ones you had to dial? The ones that sat on desks or were mounted on walls?) Zork on a rotary phone An Arduino board ties everything together. Ulysses kept track of his project using a blog. “Dial-A-Grue” made its official debut at the Maker Faire in San Francisco. A grue, by the way, is a monser in the game that likes to hang out in the dark and eat unsuspecting adventurers. I wish I could try this device in person. In the old days, people would interact with computers in a way that’s pretty similar to this. As soon as people moved away from using punch cards in batch mode, they used teletype machines to interact with the computer. (The preference for short commands in Unix systems, like “ls” or “pwd,” is a reflection of this environment. Teletypes were very slow.) They later used video terminals, with screens that were quite bigger than the tiny TDD screens. The idea also lives in the the current thin clients. Dial-A-Grue is an awesomely retro way to play classic text adventure games. Adventure game fans will want to check out a Guybrush Threepwood sculpture and 6 Best Text-Only Applications, which includes NetHack, another classic adventure game. Telehack also includes a healthy selection of text adventure games. Via: Engadget/Hack-A-Day