@screwlisp @Cat There was a lot of overlap between MUD & BBS back in the day. BBS was more persistent, but you existed thru messages, files (keep your UD ratio up!), high scores in doorgames; the only live time was if Sysop broke into chat, or rarely multi-line BBS's would have CO(nferences). MUD were things that happened when you were there.
All the furries were on MUD (later Furcadia), fanfic writers were on BBS.
#retrocomputing #bbs #mud #lambdamoo
Mudlet scripts, fishing, memories, bazaar, spire of ages
💁🏻♀️ ICYMI: 🧱🔥 A typical two-story brick house in colonial #Virginia needed about a quarter million bricks, all made by hand through grueling #work.
This look at historical brickmaking at Colonial #Williamsburg shares the process and the #history of forced labor used to get it done.
👉 Learn more: https://zurl.co/VkRaB
#usa #construction #demonstration #handmade #jobs #masonry #mud #museum #restoration #sand #slavery #traditions #tksst #video
!!THIS WEEKEND'S AGENDA!!
Tonight: The #NSFW NewsFlash. We're talking marketing mayhem & SexSEO!
Saturday: #PICKLE PJ PARTY. My #findom friends & I are draining gherkins :P
Sunday: #Subscribers only/ticket show #mud #bath #WAM #Sploshing Stream!
Mudpie v0.8.0 is out!
GMCP and MSSP support -- Mudpie now negotiates GMCP (option 201) and MSSP (option 70) with servers. GMCP data is available in Lua via mud.gmcp.send/get/getRaw/getAll and mud.onGmcp handlers. MSSP server metadata (player count, uptime, etc.) is accessible via mud.mssp.get/getAll. A new server info button in the session bar lets you browse all GMCP/MSSP data visually.
Lua HTTP and JSON APIs -- Scripts can now make async HTTP requests without enabling unsafe scripts. mud.http.get for simple GETs, mud.http.send for full control (method, headers, body). mud.json.encode/decode for JSON handling. Enables URL title fetching, webhook integrations, API lookups, and more.
New Lua APIs -- mud.sendAfter (delayed commands), mud.output/mud.grep (scrollback access), mud.prompt, mud.tts.stop, mud.color.strip, mud.clipboard.set/get, mud.regex/regexAll (Java regex for alternation and lookaheads), mud.onKey (physical keyboard shortcuts).
Key bindings -- Assign keyboard shortcuts to actions without writing Lua. Map combos like ctrl+1 to Send Command, Speak, Play Sound, or Notification. Per-world or global.
Split view -- Two panes side by side on tablets and foldables (600dp+). Each pane shows a different session or local edit. Full TalkBack support with per-pane focus switching. Not Pro-gated.
Popover pane -- A floating overlay holding multiple tabs from any session. Add via long-press on tabs. Move left/right, dismiss without losing tabs.
Bulk sound management -- Multi-select mode in the sound browser. Select, select all, and bulk delete sounds and folders.
MSP flexible file matching -- New per-world toggle. When enabled, MSP matches sounds by base name regardless of extension (server sends sword.wav, you have sword.ogg, it plays).
MUSHclient soundpack import -- Import MUSHclient soundpack folders directly into Mudpie. Scans for .mcl world files, .xml plugins, .lua scripts, and sounds. Converts triggers, aliases, keybindings, variables, and Lua scripts with static API mapping plus optional AI-assisted conversion for complex scripts.
Warning: The MUSHclient importer is brand new and should be considered experimental. Expect bugs, especially with complex soundpacks. Please report issues!
Plus: session switching shortcuts changed to Ctrl+PageDown/PageUp, punctuation passthrough for more natural TTS, battery optimizations (proper reconnect backoff, lower sensor polling, lazy TTS init), and many bug fixes.
I am happy with this DECSystem-10 MUD system for now; it's been a 35-year task.
If anyone is bored enough to be curious!
31 January 1991: Essex University's DECSystem-10 closes, meaning that MIST and ROCK, and the dodgy version of MUD we had on there, had to close. I had a mostly working VMS system that would run it with some extra programming, but I'd already sent out AberMUD to Vijay, and he'd sent it out to the world, and TinyMUDs were becoming common. MIST was losing its captive audience, and it needed that level of addiction and co-dependence to run, so I decided to let it die in its prime, rather than become a sad old relic that nobody played.
2003 and the next 20 years: I decided to build a TOPS-10 system on a VMS machine and install MIST/MUD and ROCK. Got quite a long way, and then discovered there was no BCPL compiler existing anywhere in the known world. A few years later, Richard Bartle told me that Paul Allen (I think) had found one. So this became possible, and Quentin (dot-co-dot-uk) took a great stab at it with some really old code, and Viktor Toth had BL running, so I figured that was enough. Sometime in this period, Bletchley Park got something that looked like a PDP-10, and they suggested that I go and put MUD onto it for the museum. It wasn't a PDP-10, but I did look into putting it onto a VAX for a while, but the management of Bletchley, as it turned into The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was getting more corporate and boring, so I gave up bothering.
19th Feb to 22nd Feb, 2026: I decided to build a PRIMOS machine on a Simh emulator for no apparent reason. It went fairly smoothly, so I wondered again about a DEC-10. I was missing TOPS-10 anyway, so why not? Proof of concept, setting up some test systems, seeing where TOPS-10 emulators were at these days and seeing how far Quentin had really got and how much extra work was needed. Realised I am going to have to start from scratch, mostly, using a prebuilt Steuben distro of TOPS-10 7.03 as the base.
Took a couple of weeks off to ponder whether the rest was worth it, but decided my $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription may as well pay for itself with background research, so I decided to go ahead.
9th March 9 to 18th March, 2026: A long spring, and I mostly got it all working. 92 hours of concentrated swearing and about 15 hours of destroying the planet with GPT Deep Research mode later (*), after at least 2 false starts and complete wipes. I got a system I am relatively happy with. Somewhere in there is about 4 hours of relearning TECO and fighting with getting ROCK working on code it was never meant to work on. There's still more to do, but that's just maintenance now.
BUT I FOUND ROCK! I thought it was lost forever. Somehow, that's my major victory in all this. Building the setup was hard, tedious, and very frustrating work. It probably did need somebody who knew a lot about both DEC and Unix systems management, and the MUD engine, to guide it, but it was still mostly a matter of putting together things that already existed and forcing them to work together. ROCK, though, I genuinely thought was 100% lost.
It's taken a hundred plus concentrated hours, two new dedicated hosts, a small town's water supply, and probably a few megawatts of power in the background. But this is the final re-creation of the systems I closed at the start of the 1990s.
MIST (and MUD and ROCK) will still probably end up as relics that nobody properly plays, but this project is not pretending to be anything other than an interesting throwback and museum piece now, which, 35 years after I closed it down, seems a fitting end. It also means I can resurrect Duncan Rogerson's arch-wizard, and that seems right, somehow. I will leave it up and running now.
(*) Since someone whined about my use of GPT - I could not have mentioned it, but I did because, for some tasks like this one, it saved me hundreds of hours and a lot of Googling. If I have to pick (which I do!) I'd rather use GPT than Google still. One of the useful things you can do with Deep Research is to give it a topic you want to aggregate information on (like ACCESS.USR usage) and send it away to make a summary PDF of the key points of what's useful, but triple-checked and sourced. I have read the Original TOPS-10 manuals that are wonderfully hosted on @bitsavers many times, I could knock up a perfect ACCESS.USR in a drunken stupor, whilst half asleep once, but these days I barely remember the 3-part octal protections, so I am happy to have a reference I don't need to read 10 parts of 3 different manuals to make. That's why I use AI, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. Since I work in AI Ethics and actually put into practice what I preach, I am comfortable with my use of AI, and I always disclose it :P
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security #TNMOC #blog #ADHD #Autism
🧱🔥 A typical two-story brick house in colonial #Virginia needed about a quarter million bricks, all made by hand through grueling #work.
This look at historical brickmaking at Colonial #Williamsburg shares the process and the #history of forced labor used to get it done.
#usa #construction #demonstration #handmade #jobs #masonry #mud #museum #restoration #sand #slavery #traditions #tksst #video
Kent Pitman on Technology, LLMs, AI, the environment, MOOsaico, and LambdaMOO + #lispyGopherClimate
This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.
I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.
One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.
I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.
So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to:
Or:
telnet telnet.dec10.uknet.net
(Port 2653 is available for ISPs that block 23)
And then follow the terse instructions from there.
In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.
I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...
Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.
** Update: New web client that works better.
** Another update - I added a telnet client.
Historically, the telnet connection is much more true to the traditional experience, where you were connecting to a working machine that didn't care about the MUD Guests, so there were no pointers at all. Just rumour and hearsay :)
If any of you Unix/Security people notice I messed up something, please tell me. I left "^], !sh" open on the telnet link for about 2 minutes and nearly had a heart-attack once I spotted it :D
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security
(don't try this on a phone!)
World of Welstar
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽
Moos-a-dee 🫎
TKSST • seethis.tv 🌈🪐✨
🌜Lady Marzanna🌛 God of Dough
aaron
Lorry
Lispy Gopher Climate w/ screwlisp