The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog

[h2odragon]

People make good points about how digital media is ephemeral (many then go on to assure us that this will lead to the Fall of Civilization).

Then there's delightful efforts like this.

This example gives me faith that the important things will be copied and recopied as necessary, and the ephemeral things that are lost might not be all that lost.

[criddell]

> People make good points about how digital media is ephemeral

I wonder what will happen to all of the digital-only movies and tv shows being made today. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and others are all making stuff that you can't buy on physical media and so if they decide that something shouldn't be available anymore, then it won't be.

[xfitm3]

The slippery slope is the definition of important.

[wellpast]

Is IPFS the answer to this?

[feydaykyn]

There's a great podcast about infocom games which is very funny to listen to even if you don't know/play the games (that's my case)

http://monsterfeet.com/grue/

Eaten By A Grue, the Infocom podcast

A podcast about Infocom games, text adventures, and interactive fiction Hosted by Kevin Savetz and Carrington Vanston.

[m463]

oh how wonderful... this led to another site:

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html

which had the original vax/vms Dungeon (zork) that I played when young. It actually referenced MEMQ like I remember:

    <DEFINE FEEL-FREE (LOSER)
     <TELL "FEEL FREE, CHOMPER!">
     <MEMQ ......
    The rest is, alas, unintelligible (as were the implementers).

[andrewstuart]

It would be great if this was on github - individual sites like this disappear and the history is lost.

[tedshroyer]

    curl https://eblong.com/infocom/ | grep href | grep -v http | cut -d '"' -f2 | awk '{print "curl -O https://eblong.com/infocom/" $0}' | bash -x

[dmolony]

Will this overwrite files that have the same name but are in different directories?

[m463]

that is very clever.

I usually do these sorts of things in a loop, sometimes like:

    <something> | while read f
    do
      sleep 10
      <do-something-with> "$f"
    done

[tzakrajs]

wget has a recursive mode which is perfect for archival

[glangdale]

It's not obsessively complete until they have Cornerstone - the database software that the whole company was actually meant to be about (weird, but true).

[techslave]

> I believe that the historical value of these documents to the IF community outweighs the rights of the legal owner.

I couldn’t agree less.

[techslave]

downvotes? laughable. i guess it’s also fine if texas steals copyright and can’t be touched because “sovereign”. it’s the same justification here. don’t worry about copyright because “history”.

thievery plain and simple.