{"id":3902,"date":"2014-08-22T00:47:15","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T04:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/?p=3902"},"modified":"2014-08-22T01:04:29","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T05:04:29","slug":"a-new-dave-lebling-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2014\/08\/a-new-dave-lebling-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Dave Lebling Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>USgamer<\/i> features a new interview with <i>Zork<\/i> co-author and all-around Infocom implementor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usgamer.net\/articles\/dave-lebling-interview\">Dave Lebling.<\/a> Very nice!<\/p>\n<p>The opening flourish  of the article, though, implies that in the days of <i>Adventure,<\/i> people used either green-on-black or amber-on-black video terminals to access computers, and players would see glowing letters and the &#8220;darkness of an empty command line.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This is actually fantasy, not history. As I&#8217;ve written about in <a href=\"http:\/\/nickm.com\/writing\/essays\/continuous_paper_isea.html\">&#8220;Continuous Paper: Print interfaces and early computer writing,&#8221;<\/a> as others have experienced and noted, and an amazing binder of print terminal output from an MIT student testified to me, a great deal of very early interactive fiction interaction was done on print terminals, including but not limited to the famous name-brand &#8220;Teletype.&#8221; A few people (including Lebling!) had access to top-notch video terminals, but lots of interaction was done on paper.<\/p>\n<p>Will Crowther even wrote the original version of <i>Adventure<\/i> in Fortran on an ASR-33 Teletype.<\/p>\n<p>So, when writing and first playing <i>Adventure,<\/i> perhaps the space that you would see on the paper is intentionally left blank &#8211; but you aren&#8217;t likely to be eaten by a grue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>USgamer features a new interview with Zork co-author and all-around Infocom implementor Dave Lebling. Very nice! The opening flourish of the article, though, implies that in the days of Adventure, people used either green-on-black or amber-on-black video terminals to access computers, and players would see glowing letters and the &#8220;darkness of an empty command line.&#8221; &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2014\/08\/a-new-dave-lebling-interview\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A New Dave Lebling Interview&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,73],"class_list":["post-3902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-if","tag-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3902"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3916,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3902\/revisions\/3916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}