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. 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.

from Wikipedia

1979 !!!

imagine this. Some virtual computer like the pico8 in 1979. And now in 2026, 47 years later, this Z-machine was ported to the KIM-1 by (again) Ryan Roth.

https://github.com/ryaneroth/zmachine

Stay childish! Webdoc