>Just having a moment of nostalgia here..
>
> Anyone remember having a multi-player D&D/MUD like game dial-up
>service in their city? I'm thinking around 1985 or earlier... it was
>some sort of a timeshare system with 8/16/24 ports that people could
>dial in to at an hourly rate and play. As I recall it was some sort of
AFAIK the first one was in Essex (UK), and that was ported to Compuserve
fairly soon and called British Legends. Lots of smaller, simpler stuff was
running on dailup BBS, I remember Bushido, tradewars, and a few others.
Real muds were running at a LOT of campuses, and locally a huge BBS called
I think Liberty was running something.
Even Compuserve British Legends was empty once in awhile late at night,
which was the problem with a lot of the systems. Much of the time zero
human interaction, just playing against the NPC (non player something,
character maybe). After one month where I played more than sleeping or
working combined, I quit cold turkey, and haven't mud much since. Online
first person shooter games have what most people really wanted anyway,
action and lots of it, with no hourly charges.
****************** Here is a VERY good link, and a snippet
http://www.ludd.luth.se/mud/aber/mud-history.html
Milieu was originally written for a CDC Cyber owned by the Minnesota
Educational Computer Consortium. High school students from around the
state were given access to the machine for educational purposes; they
often ended up writing chat programs and games instead. I am uncertain
of the precise time frame, but I believe Milieu probably predates MUD.
Eventually, Alan Klietz ported the game from Pascal to C and wrote an
implementation that would run on an IBM PC XT running a multitasking
operating system called QNX. Alan and a few other people formed a
company called GamBits Timesharing, attached sixteen modems to an XT,
and started selling time on it. The game, now called The Scepter of
Goth (or The Scepter and The Phoenix, or just Scepter) was now
publically available. The GamBits system had bulletin boards, mail,
Received on Fri Dec 08 2000 - 15:37:18 GMT