I still remember the day I first learned to use the Unix operating system command line. I was quite young at the time.
There is one command in particular that lets you make new directories to put files in. You can then travel into any of those directories and make subdirectories. And so on, in an ever expanding tree.
There was a moment, when I was first trying this, that I thought to myself “Wow, I can create worlds within worlds, entire vast Universes!” Looking back now, it seems like a naive thought, yet I can still recall that rapturous feeling, that heady rush of infinite possibility.
Today I put my little interactive woolly mammoth into a virtual world, and then I added a second mammoth. As soon as I saw that second mammoth beside the first one, I felt exactly that same heady rush.
It’s one thing to create a virtual creature. It is quite another to create an entire world of virtual creatures.
One creature is interesting. Two or more virtual creatures can interact with one another, play together, form relationships, become part of an ever expanding story.
Making worlds is fun.
There was an ancient Unix command called “learn” that taught using the shell, file management, and even a bit of C programming. It was very well designed, and I quickly taught myself Unix with it.
Alas, it’s been lost to the mists of time. Even several minutes with Google only turns up one vague reference to it.
Have you seen the esoteric language ‘Folders’, where a program’s instructions are encoded as a hierarchy of Windows directories?
https://esolangs.org/wiki/Folders
Wow, that definitely deserves 99 bottles of beer! 😉
Back in college, I had a friend who made a text adventure game in a VMS filesystem. Each directory was a room, and it was populated with batch files that corresponded to the various commands the user might enter. Commands like NORTH or WEST effectively changed the current directory(*) to the appropriate room. I don’t recall how objects were implemented, but it may have involved moving files from directory to directory as you traversed the map.
(*) “set the default filespec” in VMS/DCL lingo