The adventure continues: The first of Scott Adams' adventure programs, Adventureland, was an attempt to bring a version of the Colossal Cave Adventure experience (previously only on mainframes) over to home computers. Mystery House by Sierra On-line was the first graphical adventure for the Apple II, and this version is the public domain anniversary re-issue by the company to celebrate their anniversary. The Hobbit, a legendary adventure game for the ZX Spectrum, had a level of complication and subtlety beneath the surface that was years ahead of its time - characters lived their own lives, with you sometimes stumbling on the results of their battles or suffering the consequences of their meddling.
Created when he was a teenager and inspired by many games of D&D, it was his first work in a lifetime of RPG gamemaking, including the Ultima series. Akalabeth was the first major computer game by a young Richard Garriott, alias Lord British.
Check them out in monochrome glory (but don't put any major work in it).Īdventure games are a staple of early home computer software and these examples let you play some of the most famous of these virtual worlds. As a bonus WordStar is presented on the now-long-gone Osborne-1, one of the first "Luggable" computers to come out (it promised to fit under an airplane seat!). WordStar was one of the leading Word Processing software programs before fading away in the late 1980s. Visicalc brought the wonder of the electronic spreadsheet to the world, changing the business world forever. Productivity software has been around a long time, and two of the most prominent examples are Visicalc and Wordstar. They are now a single click away in a browser. While they lack the later features and graphics of modern counterparts, these programs were either big sellers at the time or recognized as first of a kind.
(historic software, vintage software, antique software)įor this initial collection, we've hand-selected a few dozen ground-breaking and historically important software products, many of whom started entire industries or pioneered new genres of programs. Many of these software products were the first of their kind, or utilized features and approaches that have been copied or recreated on many programs since. Through the use of in-browser emulators, it is possible to try out these items and experiment with using them, without the additional burdens of installing emulator software or tracking down the programs. This collection contains selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive's software archives.