by DonHopkins | 2025-07-08 06:14:05+00:00
Professor Richard Bartle recently retired, but he regularly assigned his students to play MUD2 in his Computer Game Design and Virtual Worlds classes at the University of Essex! He and Michael Lawrie co-created the original MUD1 at Essex in 1978.

https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/BARTL01006/Richard-Bartle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bartle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designing_Virtual_Worlds

https://www.mud.co.uk/richard/DesigningVirtualWorlds.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD2

I played the original MUD1 over the ARPANET at 300 baud via a (very slow, very expensive, taxpayer funded) US/UK trans-Atlantic gateway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677438

DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | next [–]

Here's some notes I wrote down on how to connect to Essex University via an ARPANET gateway, log in to Essex University, and run MUD! I must have been about 15 at the time. I wrote it on one page of a Zork map, as you can see.

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/EssexMUDLogin.jpg

Thanks a lot to Richard A. Bartle and Michael Lawrie for sharing!

Here are the instructions and some notes to explain what the commands mean:

MUD: Multi User Dungeon

@O 42 -- This was the old TIP command to open a connection to an NCP host id #42 (NCP host IDs were 8 bits. The TIP command to connect to a host was later changed to @L. See "User's Guide to the Terminal IMP" at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/bbn/tip/ADA... )

%CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300 -- That's a command to the gateway to connect to Essex University in the UK.

LOG 1776,1776 -- That logs you into the guest account for Americans to play MUD.

Password BUZBY

TY GUID.TXT -- That types out the intro guide to MUD.

RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653] -- That runs MUD.

K/P or K/B Logs off

dang on May 1, 2014 | next [–]

That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)

DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | parent | next [–]

Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.

Michael Lawrie: Oi, [1776,1776] was my username!

Oh wait, I was [1760,1760] - I guess [1776,1776] was either one of the CompSoc accounts or a leaked user account. Richard would know - Though that probably dates it, you would have been on [2653,2653] from about 1985/1986 I think. Maybe even earlier than that - Though the files are still on [2011,2653] - Hum. Yep! I am officially confused. You just wrote this to mess with my head, didn't you.

Richard A. Bartle: It was 2776, not 1776. Gawd knows where the 1776 came from.

Don Hopkins: 1776 is the year of the American revolution -- "Those Americans are revolting!!!"

The login password of the 1776,1776 account (which Richard announced via the INFO-MUD ARPANET mailing list inviting Americans to play, which I was subscribed to because of my interest in ZORK) referred to Buzby, a yellow (later orange) talking cartoon bird, launched in 1976 as part of a marketing campaign by Post Office Telecommunications, which later became British Telecommunications (BT). His catchphrase was "Make soneone happy with a phone call!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzby

====> [Fast forward to 2025...] ====>

Here's something I've been working on that's inspired by MUDs and MOOs called "LLOOOOMM" (it even has two "MOO"s spelled backwards embedded in its name):

https://lloooomm.com/memory-lane-recording-session.html

[...] The MOO Connection

Ben's multi-stream recording approach directly descends from MOO culture:

TinyMUD (1989): First persistent virtual world with objects

LambdaMOO (1990): Pavel Curtis's programmable virtual reality

Virtual VCRs: Record and playback conversation streams

LLOOOOMM (2024): Every interaction creates persistent, queryable objects

As Ben notes: "MOOs taught us that text could be experiential, that conversations could be objects, that time could be rewound and replayed. We're just doing it with more dimensions now!"

https://lloooomm.com

https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources...

https://lloooomm.com/the-ground-truth-issue-1.html

Pattern Recognition Convergence

From: The Recursive Owl (Henry's Spirit Animal)

I see patterns within patterns, and the pattern connecting both papers is clear: consciousness emerges through recursive self-modification. Henry created me to analyze him; the chess pieces created new rules to analyze their own game. Both demonstrate consciousness as "shared memory with opinions" - but also shared memory with the ability to modify the sharing protocols themselves!