Zorba.
What if your briefcase had a secret?
Zorba.
What instead of reams of paper inside was full-featured computer?
Zorba.
Introducing, Zorba.
A rugged, portable computer for the new millennium.
Featuring a 7” green CRT monitor, two 5.25 double sided, double density disk drives and
detachable keyboard with 2 foot coiled cord.
Available now for just $1,595.
Zorba.
It's worth it.
Zorba Portable Computer.
The Expert’s Choice.
Vsauce!
Kevin here.
With a 34-year-old computer that took me three weeks, 30 emails with three vintage computer
experts and a special request from an eBay store exclusively dedicated to selling old
floppy disks… just to get it to play Zork.
This is the Modular Micros Zorba 7.
One of the earliest mobile computers, its 22 pound weight is 11 times heavier than a
current MacBook, but it cost about the same at $1595.
Except that after adjusting for inflation, that %1595 is actually $4,000 today.
So in 1984, the equivalent of four grand got you 4 MHz.
Which at the time was four times the clock speed of Apollo 11’s guidance computer,
but was about 996 MHz short of being able to run Flappy Bird.
So what can you do with this?
Skyrim.
Well, 1977 Skyrim.
A game called Zork.
Alright, so let's do this.
Let’s pop this in and check it out.
There's the disk, hit enter.
And.. error.
And error.
Error.
It's literally just gonna keep doing this.
This is where I was stuck for weeks.
I'm just gonna reset it because it's not gonna stop beeping.
Okay and we're back.
This computer will not run software without very specific boot disks because it has no
built-in operating system.
Zorba was one of the last 8-bit portable computers running CP/M -- an operating system which
required booting from a disk before loading any software.
Computers that ran CP/M could run virtually any software at that time since it was industry
standard -- which it would have remained, except the company who developed CP/M failed
to sign a legal agreement with IBM to use it on their brand new 16-Bit computers…
So IBM went with Microsoft instead and MS-DOS conquered PCs.
Whoops!
The problem with my Zorba is I bought it without any disks.
Only 6,000 Zorbas were ever made, so finding one that still functions and has the system
disks is tough.
Also finding anyone who A: Knows how Zorba works and B: Has the ability to make new Zorba
disks was… difficult.
The disk with all the errors was from some guy who didn't know what he was doing.
But a guy named Retro Rescue System did know what he was doing and came through and made
me this system disk which does work.
Check it out.
Oooh.
And Zorba is alive.
It has a built-in 7” CRT screen, 4mhz CPU, 64k bytes of RAM, detachable keyboard, and
a weather-proof protective carry case.
These computers were referred to as “luggables” and they’re the direct ancestors of laptops.
It was designed for business professionals to do spreadsheets and word processing but
it became capable of doing world processing.
In 1977 -- the same month Star Wars came out -- four guys from MIT turned a side project
into one of the most influential and forgotten pieces of gaming history.
Zork was the first game to implement gameplay elements that seem so self-evident that we
don’t even think about them now.
Okay let's load Zork.
Now that the operating system is loaded in disk drive A, we have to access disk drive
B which is where Zork 1 is loaded.
And now that B is accessed we just type in Zork1 and return...
I messed that up.
Don't mess this up.
It's very particular.
And there we go.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
So one of the gameplay elements that we don't think about today is objects having weight.
A solid gold bar weighs more than a newspaper, and the total number of objects carried depends
on the weight of their contents.
Think Dark Souls.
Or that items themselves can have contents.
Meaning, it’s not just a bottle, it’s a bottle that must be opened because there’s
water inside that you need.
And the capacity of containers is also considered so a paper bag won’t hold as much as a bucket.
Zork also featured gaming’s first real villain with its own personality.
In his book Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort identifies the thief as gaming’s first memorable
character.
And the monstrous grue, responsible for one of the 28 ways you can die in Zork, became
an early meme, you can still find “You are likely to be eaten by a grue” T-shirts on
Amazon.
Zork’s creators were inspired by a groundbreaking game called Colossal Cave Adventure.
“Adventure” was a text-based journey through a fictional underground cave based on the
actual Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, and researchers with access to high-end computers were in
love with it.
Dave Lebling, one of the Zork creators, said, “For 2 weeks, all work on the ARPANET stopped.”
The precursor to the internet was delayed because of a video game.
But Adventure was too simplistic for them.
The parser only allowed for two-word commands, like “Go north” or “Take shovel.”
They wanted to create a dynamic, immersive text adventure that could handle nuanced full
sentences and had a sense of humor.
Zork players could type full commands like > SWING BOTTLE AT TROLL, and they’d be met
with responses such as “Trying to attack a troll with a glass bottle is suicidal.”
To distribute the game, Zork partnered with Personal Software, a company with an impossibly
generic name.
PS was responsible for VisiCalc, the first ever spreadsheet program.
Visicalc was one of the first pieces of software to lure businesses into computers -- and Zork
was along for the ride.
It’s funny to think about now, but at that time, people had never seen a game this detailed
-- it wasn’t even like playing a game.
It was like playing a book.
But there was no in-game map or strategy guide, let alone walkthroughs or YouTubing.
Zork players spent weeks making their own detailed maps of the world’s dungeon, items,
mazes, and NPCs.
Although they eventually published a hint book printed in invisible ink to avoid spoilers
which now goes for $150 bucks.
The result was connecting a complex story directly to each player’s imagination.
Without graphics to influence your concept of the game, everything you visualized came
from your own thoughts.
And like modern franchises like The Witcher or Mass Effect, players made choices and those
choices had ramifications.
They had agency in a fantasy world unique to them.
Zork was you -- only you.
Zork’s rich world model helped pave the way for everything from Zelda to Resident
Evil, but very few people seem to talk about Zork.
So what happened?
Zork sold nearly half a million copies over the next 5 years and helped fuel the first
round of the personal computer boom.
But computers got more powerful.
Companies like Sierra invested early in graphics-based games which were about to take over.
Suddenly, the pioneering genre of text-adventure games became an echo of the past.
In 1985, Super Mario Bros. revolutionized home gaming on the NES and that system was
so legendary that Nintendo recently revived it with the NES Classic and sold over 2 million
units.
No one is reviving Zorba.
By the time Zorba came out in 1984 it was pretty much dead luggable walking.
Apple’s Macintosh introduced the GUI with its famous Super Bowl ad and IBM’s DOS-based
PCjr came at an affordable $999.
Zorba was trapped in time.
But Zorba was part of the initial wave of being able to take a computer with you.
Zork was ground zero.
Oh this is really hard to do.
This thing, no wonder no one bought this thing.
Let's take this thing with me, clunk, clunk, clunk.
Alright.
Zork was ground zero for complex storytelling.
And now everyday, we walk around with a computer in our pocket capable of turning our lives
into digital stories.
Your phone is Zorba.
Your life is Zork.
And the decisions we make can lead to Grue or gold.
And as always, thanks
for watching.