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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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panic: kernel trap (ignored)
(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.