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9:57am on Friday, 12th March, 2021:

1980: MUD

Comment

One of the best, most accurate descriptions of the history of MUD has just appeared on Aaron Reed's substack here: https://if50.substack.com/p/1980-mud. It's very well researched. There's only one notable factual error that I've seen, and even that is somewhat arcane (a new room could be added to MUD version 2 without having to recompile, but for MUD version 3, known as MUD1, it would need a recompile; for MUD version 4, known as MUD2, it would not need a recompile unless you wanted it to be permanent).

Other than that, the only other point I might quibble over is that the opening information panel says MUD was written by "Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw", but formally it should be Roy who's first author. That may be an artefact of alphabetical order, though.

The point about trying to escape a class hierarchy by creating a new one did rather smart when I read it, but if an historical piece doesn't make you think then there's no point to it.

Overall, I'm really pleased by this. The earlier articles in the series are well worth reading, too.




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