I know that some of you (Dennis, anyway) is interested in interactive fiction, so I thought I'd pass along something my friends are talking about over at Armchair Arcade: The First Annual 1-2 K Text Adventure Contest. The rules are simple--program a text adventure game under 2.999 K. To accomplish this mission, the organizer, Paul, allows game makers their choice of BASIC, C/C++, Fortran, Assembly language--and TADS submissions for text adventures written for a variety of classic platforms (i.e., Commodore 64, Apple II, even the Bally Astrocade!) One of my fellow editors at AA has submitted an entry in Q-Basic (remember Gorilla??)

There's obviously a lot of fascinating issues surrounding this contest. It's interesting that some of these "obsolete platforms" can pack so much more into 2.9 K than the modern systems. Almost the exact program will require three to four times the space on modern-day computers than the classic units. We've obviously adopted an "SUV" approach to programming these days--thankfully, it's not too late to learn from the past about how to do things more efficiently.