Z-machine
VIRTUAL MACHINE
Z-Machine; Z-machines; Frotz; Nitfol; Z-code interpreter; InfoTaskForce; Frobnitz; Zmachine; WinFrotz; Zork Implementation Language; Z-machine (interpreter); .z1; .z2; .z3; .z4; .z5; .z6; .z7; .z8; Zilch (software)
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform.