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 https://dec10.uknet.net and login as guest, 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.

#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering

(don't try this on a phone!)

Messing with Version 4 UNIX: Revised Edition!!!

https://peertube.wtf/w/jZXFFLazMzwwCdPve5LimK

I've been intending to try out unix v4 now that it's available.

Here it is running on #Simh inside the Bluefield-2 DPU.

UNIX Fourth Edition tape has been recovered!

For half a century, the UNIX v4 tape was not found, until this year. Everything changed when staff members at the University of Utah have found the UNIX v4 tape while cleaning out storage rooms. That was a very strong sign that the computer history was preserved and archived by those who make archives of old operating systems and other computer-related things.

UNIX v4 was officially released for the DEC PDP-11/45 computers on November 1973, when those computers were the only computers eligible for this version of UNIX. Since then, it was thought to be lost until November 7th when the tape has been rediscovered. Apparently, this tape was sitting somewhere in one of the storage rooms in the University of Utah.

The Computer History Museum has further handled this by letting bitsavers.org conduct the recovery process, where the tape has been successfully recovered to a raw tape, which has then been uploaded publicly to the Internet Archive for publication.

For those who are eager to run UNIX v4 using the simulation program, simh, on your host PC, you can follow the instructions on this page.

The Internet Archive entry has very interesting pieces of history of this tape that said:

• UNIX V4 tape from the University of Utah, received by Martin Newell in June 1974 around when he modeled the Utah Teapot.
• This is the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek’s readtape tool.
• The tape was found in July 2025 by Aleks Maricq in the storage closet of the Flux Research Group in the Merrill Engineering Building, among the documents of Jay Lepreau.
• It was brought to the Computer History Museum by Jon Duerig and Thalia Archibald.

This tape was preserved in the storage room for more than half a century before it’s found in July 2025, then discovered on November, before being uploaded to the Internet Archive on December 22nd.

#news #simh #Tech #Technology #Unix #UNIXFourthEdition #UNIXV4 #update

After more than half a century, UNIX v4 tape has been found in the University of Utah, and is now live in the Internet Archive!

#Unix #UNIXv4 #DEC #PDP11 #simh #Retrocomputing #TechNews #TechUpdates #OldUnix

https://officialaptivi.wordpress.com/2025/12/23/unix-fourth-edition-tape-has-been-recovered/