Ryan C. Gordon
"What was your oddball childhood system that accidentally influenced the course of your life?" https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-mojozork-139161443
Sep 18, 2025 at 6:22amWeb
Show threadTorbjörn AnderssonSep 18, 2025

@icculus The ABC 80, I guess, but Infocom never released their games for it obviously. Most YouTube videos I can find of it are either of emulators, or the kind of demos that would have been pure science fiction back then.

A more realistic example would be this, but I recommend turning the volume down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh4kcLXepKQ

ABC 80 - Slumpmässiga tecken och ljud

YouTube
Show threadTorbjörn AnderssonSep 18, 2025

@icculus By the way, a lot of software and documentation about the ABC family of computers can be found at the Luxor archive: https://www.abc80.net/archive/

Mostly in Swedish, of course.

Luxor archive

Show threadJonathan EvraireSep 18, 2025
@icculus TRS-80 Color Computer
Note: only the CoCo3 had true lowercase support, the 1 & 2 used an inverse colored version of the uppercase letter instead and is likely more appropriate for Zork.
Show threadRyan C. GordonSep 18, 2025
@evraire Word processors for the original Apple II had this same technique: they only had uppercase characters, so they would invert the character cell's color to represent actual uppercase.
Show threadJonathan EvraireSep 18, 2025
@icculus The Dragon32 and Dragon64 looked pretty much the same as the CoCo, so by implementing one you can add the other two systems as supported too! 😉
Show threadHodgeSep 18, 2025

@icculus Didn't change the course of my life, but I briefly encountered these at school and they had Zork running on them.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gd8hRu58cB4

MicroBee Applied Technology 1984

YouTube
Show threadJonathan GerlachSep 18, 2025
@icculus ZZT-OOP. It had message passing, but no classes.