These tools have no sense on a highly chaning API which is the web. Email, Usenet and the like will have a fixed protocol for decades and will still work anywhere.
All of the Scott adams adventures are ported to the ZMachine. If you did so with that, your game would be played everywhere, even more with Puny Inform. Even under old PDA's, Game Boy's, everywhere.
Any IF archive mirror should have these packed into a zip file (look up at Google/DDG with the terms 'IF archive mirror'). Then, search for "Scott Adams" (Ctrl-f) and all of these should be bundled in a zip file (actually, two zip files). In order to play them, there's Lectrote even for Android and maybe Mac and iOS, for PC's there's Frotz for Unix/GNU-Linux and WinFrotz for Windows shines (and it has accessibility options for the blind).
If you are an Emacs user you can just install Malyon from MELPA and play them as if it were another interpreter.
IBM it's a special case. You often have the exact tools under the terminal interface and the GUI 1:1. You can do the same task in the CLI, TUI or with a GUI, now it can perfectly be over a web. But for minimum latency the CLI and TUI are essential and even a 9front user as me I acknowedge that. But 9front it's a special case too; it was basically made to be modular from day one and you can just set a CPU server and connect anything into it over 9p, be physical or not. No SSH needed, everything works the same everywhere.
Good TUI's arent bad for POS terminals and the like, where speed it's king, kinda like airports where the latency it's a matter of life of death. For everything else, just look at IBM: you have the old TUI with 3270 terminals and web 'bindings' to these to accomplish the same exact task but with a GUI interface.
But OFC some airport assistant has an AS400 console on it and that's it sending commands at blitzing speeds. These interfaces have sense there; but not for a modern desktop OS shell as the main debugging environment.
9front does that without emulating a terminal. Grep, cc, awk, walk (no find and magical incantations with -print0 there), functions instead of aliases on rc, better lists () in rc, and so on. And you can launch these command inside your graphical editor such as sam or better, Acme. And even as a pipe to selections.
No Perl but there's rc, awk and aux/* helper tools which can do tons of stuff Perl does but without calling tons of CPAN modules. 9front ships an IRC client made with rc, awk and aux/trampoline to connect (and tlsclient for TLS connections).
I mean, the point here is the standardized input/output system that leta everyone build programs without knowing each other that more or less interoperate.
That's Unix philosophy and 9front perfected it to the extreme. The bundled IRC client it's a shell script with two network helpers, one for plain conns and other one for TLS.
That's hardly a harsh truth. We use the terminal model because it works good enough and there are decades of software that rely on it. There are certainly other models that could work, but so far they haven't been adopted. I'd love Mathematica style notebooks for my shell work.
Again, don't confuse the shell (command line interpreter) with a terminal with escape codes and the like. Check how 9font does it, you get the rc shell and a few more languages with a REPL (lua ports and the like) inside a graphical window, not by emulating a VT220 terminal running the shell inside. You can freely resize the 9front's rio window manager's windows running rc (or anything else, even games, graphical browsers, images, video players...), copy, paste, cut the text, save the history, grep the contents of a window's text itself and tons more.
You are confusing the unix terminal model with specific terminals. The TTY concept doesn't mandate an 80x24 text only device. Outside of applications that specifically rely upon the existence of a directly addressable grid of characters, Unix TTYs and PTYs would work perfectly fine in a mathematica notebook style interface.
9front went further; you don't need to care about TTY's and PTY's any more except for the 'vt' tool which was made OFC to connect to Unix terminals and to run some legacy software thru APE/NPE (minimal POSIX compat modules).
The core concept of Unix weren't the terminals, but text, pipes and the orthogonal composability. rc under 9front doesn't need a terminal emulating some DEC hardware crudely. You get a shell not bound to sizes. Scripts run in the same way, but with superior editing capabilities.
Unix is not about a terminal, that the obsolete medium, kinda like preaching about DOS PC with 386's... and CGA video cards.
9front copes with actual text throwing the terminal as a different tool to run legacy stuff in such as SSH or some small ANSI C tools either with the APE compat layer or NPE binding ANSI C code to Plan9 native functins.
You can resize windows with shells under 9front freely, no more SIGWINCH. No more broken cuts and pastes while running a terminal multiplexer. No control code risks executing potential malware.
In 9front, a decades old fork of Plan9. It's basically more Unix than Unix itself, by expanding the 'everything it's a file motto' and now for real and leaving out useless VT220 emulators (and any TTY/serial emulating connections) for legacy stuff such as the 'vt' emulator itself running under a graphical window and, for instance, when running SSH against Unix machines sending you a PTY plus a shell.
Also: https://wiby.me
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