Mastodawn

This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.

https://dec10.uknet.net

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

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!)

ttyd - Terminal

Charlie Stross 3d ago

@lorry What port/protocol? ssh, telnet, rlogin, or is there a web interface for us noobs? (I only used Essex MUD once—in 1986!)

@cstross the Web link is a direct telnet with the terminal emulator already setup.

I decided against direct telnet, mostly so I had control over the terminal settings. 1970s operating systems are not that forgiving of bad setups.

https://dec10.uknet.net

Simon Bisson 3d ago

@lorry @cstross Getting a Cloudflare timeout here.

Charlie Stross 3d ago

@sbisson @lorry Haven't got as far as the Cloudflare timeout, but Safari on iPadOS 26 is choking on loading.

@sbisson @cstross I will have a look at my cloudflare setup, I might have been a little too harsh.

@sbisson @cstross hummm, it's working for me. In true timeshare operator fashion, I will dig after a cuppa.

@sbisson @cstross Apparently I'd broken something at the Cloudflare end but it was completely random.

It SHOULD be working now. If it's not I will probably have to change front-end software.

Charlie Stross 2d ago

@lorry @sbisson I connected: there's a weirdness in the login page—every time I type a character in the username entry box, the web page scrolls to the bottom! (Browser is Safari on iPadOS 26 so this may be a webkit related thing?)

@cstross @sbisson it's my fault for trying to force the front end on a machine that is definitely not setup for Web stuff. I'll move the Web parts to a machine I actually look after. The only problem is that I'll kill the Web clients every time I reload the Web server so I might have to put a teeny bit more thought into this once I get it stable because security wise that will leave floating TOPS monitor sessions on connectable lines. For now though, I'll redo the front end. I am far happier managing TOPS-10 than bloody Unix and have been for 40 years.

Charlie Stross 2d ago

@lorry @sbisson I've never had an account on a TOPS-10 machine, but I assume being DEC it's vaguely CP/M-ish …? (At least at the luser level.)

@cstross @sbisson I think it's good now... I have logged out of the front and to stop myself fixing things that need a restart for now.

@cstross if you are feeling really brave...

RUN ADVENT[42,42]

Though you'd have to be really dedicated to retro gaming to want to play it. But at least I installed the #Stanford version that doesn't require caps lock stuck on.

@lorry @cstross I’ve got a simulated KS10 running DECwar… in a Raspberry pi. Which is also running a couple of VAXen and maybe an IBM mainframe or two…

John de Largentaye 3d ago

@jguillaumes @lorry @cstross speaking of Moore’s Law… a few years ago I had a similar question and wondered if a Raspberry Pi (3? 4? I forget) had outpaced my 20y-old beast of a Dell Precision M65 workstation laptop that i keep in a drawer for nostalgia reasons.

Turns out, no! The old Core (2?) Duo still beat out the RasPi in single-threaded, and even I/O (I may had retrofitted it with an SSD?)

Perhaps i still have the numbers somewhere, and
I should repeat the benchmark with a RasPi5

John de Largentaye 3d ago

@jguillaumes @lorry @cstross (Obviously the RasPi beats the old laptop in performance-per-watt and -per-price)

Charlie Stross 3d ago

@jlargentaye @jguillaumes @lorry The pi5 is a beast: need to get mine out somewhere semi-permanent and whack on it.

@cstross @jlargentaye @lorry the 16GB version is over 200 USD now. Thanks, AIbros…

Charlie Stross 3d ago

@jguillaumes @jlargentaye @lorry I bought a Pi 500+ before the current lunacy got started. Luckily.

DaveBarnes 3d ago

@jguillaumes @lorry @cstross

What about the DECtape drives?

@davebarnes @lorry @cstross I have some vax hardware, but it’s in the microVax range. No tape drives (I would need a new apartment to host them!), except for a small SCSI DLT unit that probably does not work anymore.

@davebarnes @jguillaumes @cstross If you read the weblog post I sent somewhere in this thread, there's a rant about trying to read 7-track PDP-10 tapes that Richard had sent me. I thought I had just about every tape drive, but not that one.

bitsavers.org 6h ago

@lorry @davebarnes @jguillaumes @cstross

There are very few people left in the world who can successfully recover 7-track 1/2" media. The UK needs an institution capable of duplicating what I have working at the Computer History Museum in California.

@bitsavers @davebarnes @jguillaumes @cstross

I gave it a hell of a try :)

I thought I had a 7-track tape somewhere in my pile of junk. Back when I worked in Epidemiology, I spent a lot of time trying to collate patient death data from every health recorder in the UK. They came on everything you can imagine, and I'd become the NHS's go-to tape-and-disk person as a somewhat annoying and unwanted side job for quite a while.

But nope, outside an environment where I could just send out a message begging to borrow a 7-track, I was completely buggered. I think it's the first time I have ever truly been defeated by a smug-looking bit of media, daring me to eviscerate it.

Mind you, now I know where to borrow a drive! Although by now these tapes are kinda crispy :)

bitsavers.org 4h ago

@lorry @davebarnes @jguillaumes @cstross

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xlq_MPWNKk

I have an identical drive with a 7-track head mounted.

Computer History Museum Recovers Rare UNIX History

YouTube

@bitsavers @davebarnes @jguillaumes @cstross Lovely :)

Funny thing is, I was almost tempted to go the path of exploring the idea of reading the digital information off it with an offset head - But I think at that point I'd (sensibly) convinced myself that it was really just an unreadable 9-track because it was pretty crispy at that point. Also, the chances of the compiler actually being on the tape were very low anyway. User backups are unlikely to have system partitions on them, so it really was a Hail Mary move.

I found a photo of the setup I was mostly using, a Microvax something-or-other on top of a DEC TSZ07 (my favourite DEC tape drive, and so the one I kept using, to the detriment of my poor back!). The photo info says this was 16 Nov 2003, so I have a date for that part of the project now, too.

Abram Kedge🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇨🇦 wryly 3d ago

@lorry When I was 15 I was in the first ever Computer Studies O level class at my school. The practical sessions involved sending programs we had punched onto paper tape to the mainframe in Chelmsford over a telephone with acoustic couplers strapped to the handset.

The only thing I know about the mainframe was that it had 36bit wide memory - could it have been the same computer that MUD was originally developed on?

@AbramKedge yup! That was UK.AC.ESSEX.KL10. I was the last user on it, apart from Rick, the systems manager, who shut it down for the last time around me checking I'd saved everything for the 30th time.

TOPS-10 was a great operating system although I am worried why my muscle memory seems to have remembered #TECO so well.

Abram Kedge🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇨🇦 wryly 3d ago

@lorry oh that's awesome! A real part of history. Sad that nothing of the hardware was preserved. Thank you for your work, and for keeping the story alive.

@lorry The pig got me 😂

Rob Ricci 3d ago

@lorry cc @aaronareed

Reinhard Lackner 3d ago

@lorry Auge @leyrer

Liam Proven 3d ago

> my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen

I think this merits considerable expansion... (!)

@lproven Ah it's a sad story.

I used to do a lot of work in preservation, partly because when I was working on Edinburgh's Tardis program (I think @cstross was on that?) I had to drive around trying to find bits of hardware for maintenance from places like Daresbury Labs, and it was depressing seeing what they were throwing away - And this was in 1990 - But I would take what I could rescue in a van or car, and try to find places to store it.

Sadly two of the places were a storage unit, and the back of my land-rover for a while, and the storage unit was broken into and the Land Rover stolen (which is another rant) - So I lost 100% of the offline backups (tapes , listings and game-design notes), including the first Multi User game I wrote on a PRIME in 1984 (and also my first computer dating app in 1983/1984 too!).

I had some bits left, mostly the small bits, and I rebuilt a lot of it ( some on https://old.technology, the gallery software broke years ago, so there are no proper descriptions ).

I gave a bunch of my stuff to Bletchley Park when I moved to Canada, and resisted taking too much away. They had a PERQ there that I desperately wanted to crush and eradicate from history in the car park, but they wouldn't let me.

Weirdly, there was a submarine in the car park at the time too - But I am going way off topic :)

Liam Proven 3d ago

@lorry @cstross Oh my! That is _extremely_ unfortunate.

Mycotropic 3d ago

@lorry @lproven @cstross

I grew up in Manassas Virginia just down the road from an IBM campus, I started high school in 1980. I was friends with a "computer nerd" with the last name Fry, his dad's name was Terry. Terry had this hobby of doing what you were doing, hitting the junk yard and acquiring discarded hardware. IBM would make space in their facilities by putting old gear into a truck and dropping it off at the junkyard so Terry would pull up behind them, load it back up and take it home. We're talking mainframe equipment l, six foot tall magnetic tape drives cabinets, audio modems that required a telephone handset, stuff like that.

I have no idea what models or anything but my friend had a green background monitor and he'd log on to the 1980's message boards and download Phone-Phreq lists so we all had free long distance for years!

The first game I ever played was Hammurabi's Code though!

Wes George 3d ago

I live in Manassas now, and today I learned it used to have an IBM facility! It's apparently housing Lockheed and BAE today.

Dave Ackley 3d ago

@lorry @lproven @cstross
ah i remember.. "the best thing about PERQs is they don't run faster at night"

@livcomp @lproven @cstross The best thing about PERQs is that they are a decent shape to drive a large truck over.

(Actually, the bee "busy" icon was cool the first time you saw it, but that is it!)

Ian Turton 3d ago

@lorry @[email protected] @cstross I was just going to say that I had played it on TARDIS. I recall it went brrrm brrrm if you asked for Laurie

Oh those were the days, when I was first exposed to Unix while work was still on EMAS.

Lars Brinkhoff 3d ago

@lorry Are you aware that Quentin got Essex BCPL and MUD running under TOPS-10? https://www.quentin.org.uk/tag/pdp10/

@larsbrinkhoff Yes! I used a lot of his stuff for a shortcut to get the BCPL up and running - He saved me hours (I was going to link him but I forgot his name so thanks for that opportunity).

He did a great job with what he was working with, but that MUD was very old, and I don't think Quentin had ever managed any TOPS-10 systems so there were a few paths I didn't take and I built my systems mostly from a cleanish build. But I am very glad he did the legwork with BCPL.

These versions of the games have (relatively) much more modern code, and the MUD is V3 which is a combined MUD/VALLEY system and a lot of bugs (and usability) issues fixed. I suspect I also had a lot more support files than he had access to.

Quentin's version was also not protected in any way, which, for a live system, I guess I'd have been the person I'd have asked, so that was convenient :D

But yeah, I definitely shouldn't diminish how much help his original project was.

I will release the tape images to this system when I get everything stable and strain-tested.

Lars Brinkhoff 3d ago

@lorry Good to hear, thanks!

@larsbrinkhoff If you know him, say thanks for me please :)

Lars Brinkhoff 2d ago

@lorry I did. He said he'd get in touch.

@lorry This is outstanding, and I really need to get back into MUDs.

Phil Haigh 3d ago

@lorry love that this has been done. It inspired me to build a poor imitation at Coventry Polytechnic in 1985 we christened “Fantarzuk” and I still have the source code sitting around today somewhere, just none of the data files it ran from.

#HertonThePlacid #Goodgulf #coventryPolytechnic #Fantarzuk

@gulfie Ooh, I thought I knew all the UK games! one to add to my list :)

My first one was called MUCK from 1983/1984 running on PRIMOS on a Prime 2250 - It was great, brilliant game-play design (mostly not by me, and Neil Burgess is no longer with us) and I think a pretty innovative multi-user mechanism (I did write that bit :P) - But each move took about 45 seconds, so as people said, it may as well just be a tabletop game that happened to be running on a minicomputer. Humph.

Phil Haigh 3d ago

@lorry it was played by a couple of dozen of us, hacked together C code, it was good fun. I collaborated with another student, Mark Strentz. I’d shudder to go and look at the code now, I basically used it as a mechanism to learn the language.

Also fond memories of Rogue and then Hack on our small department Unix server. Research students complaining about us burning CPU cycles over lunchtime when they were trying to run circuit simulations 🤪

Phil Haigh 3d ago

@lorry some of the very smart cookies in CompSci (I was electronics) put together a kinda social network - list of logged in users down the left side, you could chat with an individual or as part of a group, all written on a Harris 800 (no idea what language they used for that).

One of my lab technicians was William JG Overington who invented the concept of Telesoftware (the code you could download from Teletext if you had more money than sense and the adapter for the BBC micro).

@gulfie I worked with a lot of the old Prestel/Micronet/Compunet people in my days at BTnet - There were some great people from that era still hanging around at BT!

Compunet ran a very early of MUD (so did Compuserve, confusing isn't it!) on their DecSystem 10s too.

#UK #BT #Prestel #Micronet

Phil Haigh 3d ago

@lorry I did my industrial training in the videotext research department at Martlesham Heath in ‘86. The team still had the original Prestel prototype - several large boards of wire wrapped TTL in a wooden box with a keyboard at the front and a row of 4” fans across the back. I played with their early Cable TV system at Westminster Cable they weren’t supposed to deploy, and did a bit of research programming for them, can’t remember what for though. First experience of VMS.

@gulfie I had a desk and mailbox at Martlesham but I only ever went there once. I went through a phase of seeing how many desks I could get in the company.

Phil Haigh 3d ago

@lorry took me 9 months to get a phone on my desk. It was a standing joke. Phone arrived a couple of days before I finished my placement 🤣