Zorba. Zorba. 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 7â 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 Expertâs 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 11âs 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. Letâs 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 7â CRT screen, 4mhz CPU,
64k bytes of RAM, detachable keyboard, and a weather-proof protective carry case. These computers were referred to as âluggablesâ
and theyâre 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 donât 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, itâs not just a bottle, itâs
a bottle that must be opened because thereâs water inside that you need. And the capacity of containers is also considered
so a paper bag wonât hold as much as a bucket. Zork also featured gamingâs first real villain
with its own personality. In his book Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort
identifies the thief as gamingâs 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 âYou are
likely to be eaten by a grueâ T-shirts on Amazon. Zorkâs creators were inspired by a groundbreaking
game called Colossal Cave Adventure. âAdventureâ 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,
âFor 2 weeks, all work on the ARPANET stopped.â 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 âGo northâ or âTake shovel.â 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 theyâd be met with responses such as âTrying to attack
a troll with a glass bottle is suicidal.â 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. Itâs funny to think about now, but at that
time, people had never seen a game this detailed -- it wasnât 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 worldâs 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 playerâs 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. Zorkâs 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. Appleâs Macintosh introduced the GUI with
its famous Super Bowl ad and IBMâs 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.
1:42 he judges processor power solely based on clock speed, annoys me so much when people do that.
As this machine clearly predates the era of superscaler microprocessors, cpu clock speed is a pretty reasonable gauge of overall system performance