[MUD-Dev] MUD timeline

[F. Randall Farmer]

Two replies (I can't remail to this list from home, sorry for the delay)

> When did Habitat become WorldsAway?

It's easier to provide the rest of the Habitat lineage:

1988: Club Caribe ships on QuantumLink
1990: Fujitsu Habitat (FMTowns, other PCs later)
1994: WorldsAway from Cultural Technologies division of Fujitsu, later
shipped in Japan as Fujitsu Habitat II
1998: Electric Communities' fully distributed "ECHabitats/Microcosm"
   closed beta (3D, secure locally hosted objects.) Moth-ball'd in 1999.
  ( Too Big, Too Slow, Too soon. But _that's_ another paper, I think. )


---

Mr. James sure seems to know lots about Electric Communities AKA
Communities.com :-) I'm flattered.

At 11:08 PM 3/5/00 +0000, Daniel James wrote:
>(1993)
>>*    Electric Communities is founded by Farmer and Morningstar. 

The founders were, for the record:
Douglas Crockford (AKA Crock)
F. Randall Farmer (AKA Randy)
Chip Morningstar

Though the business partnership started as just Chip and myself
in 1991 or so, it quickly grew to include Crock. During this
period, we did the WorldsAway contract as well as designing a
skip-a-generation secure distributed "Cyberspace OS." This
was the basis of our business plan, which we set into motion
on January 1st, 1995 when we officially incorporated and took
our first venture money.

>EC's product was not The Palace - that was developed by a 
>division of Time Warner and later - 1998, I think - acquired
>by EC, who are now communities.com

The Palace was launched on November 15th, 1995 - at that time it
was owned by Time Warner Interactive. Soon thereafter it was
spun out, with large shares sold to Intel and Softbank.
EC purchased it during the spring/summer of 1998.

>EC's product (aside from contracting on Worldsaway) was a
>major revision of Habitats, called both Habitats and Microcosm.
>It had a number of very interesting properties, notably a secure
>distributed architecture. It was mothballed during The Palace /
>Onlive! acquisition, though I believe they are continuing to
>work on the technology and some of it (www.erights.org) is open
>source.

This is a kind summary of the early results of our work. :-)

Since then we've focused on putting our unique tools and
experience to work on the less technically ambitious Palace
and Onlive technologies. :-)

Randy

F. Randall Farmer                "Home pages are passe', everybody's
Communities.com                  building a palace" - Time Magazine
Cofounder and VP Services        http://www.communities.com
   
randy at communities.com            




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