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

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Lorry Mar 17

@cstross @jguillaumes @jlargentaye

Leeds University kept some of its DECSystem-10 stuff, or it had last time I was there in 2005.

It's funny it had 60 serial lines. I was the only user of it for the last 3 years, I was on it the day it shut down as well - That was the first DECSystem 10 I was on that was killed with just me on it, UK.AC.SX.KL10 was the second.

#Leeds #LeedsUniversity

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Steve Holden Mar 20

@lorry @cstross @jguillaumes @jlargentaye I was a Computational Science undergraduate when that DECSysytem-10 was installed, and my final-year project was the OS interface for a SPITBOL compiler for it.

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Lorry Mar 20

@holdenweb @cstross @jguillaumes @jlargentaye

Oh, and Andrew McCann was my tutor when I was at Leeds Computational Science, so I assume you knew him fairly well if you were working on SPITBOL.

He was genuinely the only person in that department I got along with, and he was pretty honest with me and told me I should just pack up and leave because it wasn't the right environment for me, personality-wise.

Eventually, he left instead, and I stayed on and slogged through the final year to get a 3rd (the most I could get at that point because I was planning on leaving in my 2nd year and had done nothing, passing my exams was kind of a shock and made me have to rethink). I then got a postgrad placement at Leicester in a place that was the right environment for me, personality-wise.

Amusingly, though, when I left Leicester I went back to Leeds to run systems for another department, and they had to deal with me as a peer. The only person who coped well with that change was Ted Appleby over in Mech Eng. We stayed friends for years, and he gave me a load of SUN, VAX, and SGI stuff for my museum into the early 2000s. These pics were from a 2005 pickup, so he was still there then.

I am going way off topic, but it's an excuse to post pics of old junk :D

#Retrocomputing #museum #SUN #SGI #VAX #LittleIron #Leeds #LeedsUniversity f

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Steve Holden

@lorry Yes, I wrote the OS i/face and Gary Harding wrote the translator that converted the interpreter to DEC-10 assembler. Tony McCann was the supervisor for that project. About twenty years ago, IIRC, I stayed close to Esholt for a while and called on him to say hello and thanks. Sadly by that time his condition had affected his memory so badly he didn't remember me, but he was charmed to learn how much help he'd been to me. Lovely man.