This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.
I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD (AND the MIST) on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.
One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.
I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.
So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to https://dec10.uknet.net and login as guest, then follow the terse instructions from there.
In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.
I should note that this is a museum peice, without a community they are still wildly popular games with a huge community in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...
Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh
(don't try this on a phone!)
