This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.
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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 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 although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. 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 #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering
(don't try this on a phone!)
@lorry This is outstanding, and I really need to get back into MUDs.
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@larsbrinkhoff Yes! I used a lot of his stuff for a shortcut to get the BCPL up and running - He saved me hours (I was going to link him but I forgot his name so thanks for that opportunity).
He did a great job with what he was working with, but that MUD was very old, and I don't think Quentin had ever managed any TOPS-10 systems so there were a few paths I didn't take and I built my systems mostly from a cleanish build. But I am very glad he did the legwork with BCPL.
These versions of the games have (relatively) much more modern code, and the MUD is V3 which is a combined MUD/VALLEY system and a lot of bugs (and usability) issues fixed. I suspect I also had a lot more support files than he had access to.
Quentin's version was also not protected in any way, which, for a live system, I guess I'd have been the person I'd have asked, so that was convenient
But yeah, I definitely shouldn't diminish how much help his original project was.
I will release the tape images to this system when I get everything stable and strain-tested.
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@gulfie Ooh, I thought I knew all the UK games! one to add to my list
My first one was called MUCK from 1983/1984 running on PRIMOS on a Prime 2250 - It was great, brilliant game-play design (mostly not by me, and Neil Burgess is no longer with us) and I think a pretty innovative multi-user mechanism (I did write that bit :P) - But each move took about 45 seconds, so as people said, it may as well just be a tabletop game that happened to be running on a minicomputer. Humph.
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@larsbrinkhoff If you know him, say thanks for me please
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@lproven Ah it's a sad story.
I used to do a lot of work in preservation, partly because when I was working on Edinburgh's Tardis program (I think @cstross was on that?) I had to drive around trying to find bits of hardware for maintenance from places like Daresbury Labs, and it was depressing seeing what they were throwing away - And this was in 1990 - But I would take what I could rescue in a van or car, and try to find places to store it.
Sadly two of the places were a storage unit, and the back of my land-rover for a while, and the storage unit was broken into and the Land Rover stolen (which is another rant) - So I lost 100% of the offline backups (tapes , listings and game-design notes), including the first Multi User game I wrote on a PRIME in 1984 (and also my first computer dating app in 1983/1984 too!).
I had some bits left, mostly the small bits, and I rebuilt a lot of it ( some on https://old.technology, the gallery software broke years ago, so there are no proper descriptions ).
I gave a bunch of my stuff to Bletchley Park when I moved to Canada, and resisted taking too much away. They had a PERQ there that I desperately wanted to crush and eradicate from history in the car park, but they wouldn't let me.
Weirdly, there was a submarine in the car park at the time too - But I am going way off topic
-
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 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 although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. 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 #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering
(don't try this on a phone!)
This is a weblog post I wrote over a decade ago about the last time I tried to do this:
Primary Source: Not Found - The Information Superhighwayman
As many of you may know, I have a somewhat large and extensive computer museum, a lot of which can be seen on http://old.technology. I didn’t start collecting these because it was trendy; in fact it was the complete opposite of trendy when I started. Back in the late 80s and early 90s I seemed […]
The Information Superhighwayman (superhighwayman.com)
It gets there in the second half
The sad thing about reading that, which I wrote in 2012, is that so many of the Primary Sources I can think of for a lot of this stuff are dead now; so it's still all being lost every day. I have done some interviews, so as I discovered a few weeks ago, some of that is preserved on Wikipedia (someone had posted a photo/article I had no idea existed) - But I have a Wiki page and deliberately force myself to do some interviews these days - most people don't.
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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 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 although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. 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 #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering
(don't try this on a phone!)
@lorry blimey. That's a blast from the past. Thank you. 2653,2653 is etched in my brain and somehow the muscle memory all came flooding back.
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@lorry blimey. That's a blast from the past. Thank you. 2653,2653 is etched in my brain and somehow the muscle memory all came flooding back.
@zymurgic I admit, I was gonna make people go to 00004960000001.uknet.net
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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 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 although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. 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 #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering
(don't try this on a phone!)
@lorry Truly truly epic -- and as usual it ate up a huge amount of my time that I had no business giving it.
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@lproven Ah it's a sad story.
I used to do a lot of work in preservation, partly because when I was working on Edinburgh's Tardis program (I think @cstross was on that?) I had to drive around trying to find bits of hardware for maintenance from places like Daresbury Labs, and it was depressing seeing what they were throwing away - And this was in 1990 - But I would take what I could rescue in a van or car, and try to find places to store it.
Sadly two of the places were a storage unit, and the back of my land-rover for a while, and the storage unit was broken into and the Land Rover stolen (which is another rant) - So I lost 100% of the offline backups (tapes , listings and game-design notes), including the first Multi User game I wrote on a PRIME in 1984 (and also my first computer dating app in 1983/1984 too!).
I had some bits left, mostly the small bits, and I rebuilt a lot of it ( some on https://old.technology, the gallery software broke years ago, so there are no proper descriptions ).
I gave a bunch of my stuff to Bletchley Park when I moved to Canada, and resisted taking too much away. They had a PERQ there that I desperately wanted to crush and eradicate from history in the car park, but they wouldn't let me.
Weirdly, there was a submarine in the car park at the time too - But I am going way off topic
I grew up in Manassas Virginia just down the road from an IBM campus, I started high school in 1980. I was friends with a "computer nerd" with the last name Fry, his dad's name was Terry. Terry had this hobby of doing what you were doing, hitting the junk yard and acquiring discarded hardware. IBM would make space in their facilities by putting old gear into a truck and dropping it off at the junkyard so Terry would pull up behind them, load it back up and take it home. We're talking mainframe equipment l, six foot tall magnetic tape drives cabinets, audio modems that required a telephone handset, stuff like that.
I have no idea what models or anything but my friend had a green background monitor and he'd log on to the 1980's message boards and download Phone-Phreq lists so we all had free long distance for years!
The first game I ever played was Hammurabi's Code though!
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@log Yup, that and get caught in the middle of a Wizard argument you know nothing about and get killed randomly.
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