[MUD-Dev] MUD timeline

[Richard Woolcock]

cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA wrote:
> 
> [Raph Koster:]
> 
> > 1972          Peter Langston's Empire: multiplayer Star Trek game on Plato
> >               Plato reaches capacity for 1000 users
> 
> Is that meant to be a ';' or ',' after 'Empire'? Makes more sense that way.
> 
> Sometime in the early-to-mid 70's there was a multi-player Space War
> game that ran on DEC VMS systems. I played that one for about an hour
> one day.
> 
> In 1988, Rich Skrenta at Northwestern University released the game
> "Monster". It's a multiplayer adventure-type game written in Pascal.
> I have a paper listing. The comment at the top of the listing:
> 
>     This is Monster, a multiuser adventure game system
>     where the players create the universe.
> 
> I believe that means that it had online creation. A vague memory says that
> it was for VAX VMS, and did its interprocess communication through files.

You don't mean through mailboxes?  While I was at University, a couple 
of students wrote their own (simple) muds in Pascal on the University
VAX network using mailboxes.  Although I never actually got to look
at the source code I did speak to them about it (as well as track 
what they were doing by watching the network processes).  

Basically each user would have a mailbox file open, and every time some
text had to be sent to that user, it would be written to their file.
Rather than having to constantly read the file, the mailbox-reading
process would only bother sending information once something new had 
been written to the file.

Anyway, to avoid straying off topic too much - is anyone planning to
maintain this timeline that's being put together?  It would be a worthy
addition to any mud-related website.

KaVir.



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