Nice PC-museum..

On 5/17/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: It's one of the things that aided Infocom's success - their cost of writing a new game was limited to the development expense of writing the game itself. Since they had begun their company by writing a virtual machine (the "Z-Machine"), all they had to do to port their oeuvre was to write the new virtual machine for the new platform. When I worked at Software Productions, writing kids software that was published in Reader's Digest, we had the opposite problem - we were 100% involved in the platform. Adding a new machine was a major hassle. Since our target was the home, and the era was 1981-1984, we started with 6502-based machines (I was hired to add some C-64 experience to a room full of Apple guys), and only reluctantly supported the PC (around the time of MS-DOS 2.1). Our most popular platforms (by sales) were the Apple II and the C-64. As an aside, this is the company I worked at where we literally used a PC jr as a doorstop when we closed-up shop. Having written and worked on floppy-based databases, I'd agree - there was limited consumer interest when your entire database had to fit on a single floppy. I remember helping my mother with a problem at her typing shop where they had to do some sort of mail list merge on a Kaypro... it was a slow, messy affair, and it was only a few hundred records. In context of the thread, this was in 1985, long after PCs were ensconced in the workplace. Many were still using CP/M machines bought in the previous 5 years. -ethan