

An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect - __david__
http://porkrind.org/missives/dungeon-zork-map-in-duplicity/

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

~~~
primitur
Its Google-od, looking through the Mirror.

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lnanek2
Reminds me of a book I just read, Ready Player One:
[http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-
ebook/dp/B004J4WKUQ/r...](http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-
ebook/dp/B004J4WKUQ/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1351378877&sr=8-1)

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

~~~
quink
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.

~~~
unimpressive
So what are some four and five star books?

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unimpressive
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
"Simulacra and Simulation" was the one I remember.

~~~
thristian
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>

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aidenn0
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.

~~~
primitur
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 ..

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astangl
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.

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bcl
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 :/

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kristopher
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?

~~~
dsil
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.

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peteforde
This sounds like a job for Reddit.

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showerst
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!

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rocky1138
Do we know who the set designer was? Can we get him/her to chime in?

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jwallaceparker
Yes. That information is in the article.

The set decorator was George DeTitta Jr.

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

~~~
jtheory
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.

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bobinator30
here's the original hand-drawn version of the cave that i used to use
<http://bit.ly/S5SRIK>

