Z-machine

Z machine may refer to:

• Z-machine, a text-based game interpreter
• Z Pulsed Power Facility, an x-ray generator at Sandia National Laboratories, informally known as the "Z machine"

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 all its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system.