Happening to think for the first time in a while of a TRS-80 Model 100 mailing list, I looked at its bookmarked web archive and saw some recent messages beginning with a question about “the Z-machine for the Model 100.” (That question had been inspired by news of some Infocom source code becoming “safe to distribute.”) As the discussion explained how someone had managed to get “the virtual machine that ran Infocom and later adventures” running on the portable with the aid of REX, a recent storage development for it, my amusement might have been tempered by reflecting on how I’d used the somewhat different (and more “volatile”) REXCPM to run the old Infocom interpreter for that operating system, but more to prove it could run than to play through games using it. That more people had their own chance to squeeze text adventures onto the Model 100’s small screen seemed good in itself, but perhaps thoughts of “paths not taken” left me wondering if I ought to at least try that other option myself.
( Paths now taken )

When my RSS reader pointed me to a retrospective on QuickTime as “an Apple innovation of the 1990s that managed to have made it out of that decade,” it just so happened I’d managed in recent days to have simulated an early stage of that step towards “multimedia” myself. While working with the Snow emulator to try out “dot matrix printing” and “old word processors,” I’d kept an eye on its development. A “branch” promising steps towards offering the Motorola 68030 microprocessor had got my attention, but I’ll admit to wondering how many steps would be needed until it became available. When the first “030 Macs” showed up in the general “cutting-edge build,” it was something of a pleasant surprise.
( Speeding up and stress testing )