El Reg reports:
The source code for MUD1, a multi-user dungeon created at the University of Essex in 1978, and generally held to have been the world's first online multi-player game, has been recovered.
The code has landed at Stanford University, which says it has secured permission to redistribute the game's blueprints from the authors Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw.
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Source Code for World's First MUD Recovered
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03 2014, @02:23AM
but I'll stick to Discworld MUD thanks
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03 2014, @02:39AM
According to which omniscient council of historical truth? How do we know some unknown guy didn't make something in his basement even earlier?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Tork on Saturday May 03 2014, @03:21AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by hopp on Saturday May 03 2014, @03:27AM
What if he had Dissociative Identity Disorder?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03 2014, @06:17AM
It is from Essex. There is a trend for Brits to claim to be the first in various technology in spite of evidence or through technicalities. It is a cultural thing like American 'Exceptionalism'. In this case there have been networked games going back to the early '70's. I do recall Spacewar (1962) being able to be played from far off distances on terminals. That likely does not count for their definition of 'online multi-player'.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday May 03 2014, @07:29AM
"""
I have no idea what one is, but this is supposedly a UDP/IP header, and the payload is the following chess move:
23. a5-b7
"""
and put it on a carrier pigeon's leg - would that have been an online multiplayer game?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03 2014, @06:36AM
Al Gore invented MUDs.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mendax on Saturday May 03 2014, @11:40AM
I first played on MUD's 25 years ago and got hooked on them for a while. They are the grand-daddies of games such as World of Warcraft, etc. But the resources they required are very different.
In fact, the text-based MUD's are a terrific measure of just how far computer technology has come in the last 25 years. The first MUD I played on was in Sweden and ran on a DEC Unix workstation with not a lot of memory. The game's world was rather limited, the game state was stored on disk, and you actually had to log into the a MUD account to play it. Furthermore, only 10 users were permitted at a time. Yet, the game triggered a lot of page faults and the OS swapped way too much. Five years later, I had a 486DX-based PC running Linux that could run with ease a much larger variant of that MUD code that kept everything in memory. Then five years later the game could have been run on a PDA. Now, if I wanted to, I could probably run maybe 500 instances of that MUD on my iMac. What will the next 10 years bring I wonder.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.