Extracts from The Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer. A fascinating work which, unusually for computer scientists, is full of lapidary phrases and well-written prose.

There were two sorts of implementation challenges that Habitat posed. Thefirst was the problem of creating a working piece of technology — developingthe animation engine, the object-oriented virtual memory, the message-passingpseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64(the backend system also posed interesting technical problems, but itsconstraints were not as vicious). The second challenge was the creation andmanagement of the Habitat world itself. It is the experiences from the latterexercise that we think will be most relevant to future cyberspace designers.