Well, I'll throw in my little history, while it's going around. If this is
[too] off-topic, may I be beaten with the Off-Topic Spatula of
Unpleasantness.
A long, long time ago (4-5 years) in a galaxy far... erm, forget it.
Anyway, living in a boring town in Oregon led me to computers, computers led
me to modems, and modems led me to BBSs.
Anyway, the primary BBS I inhabited was (is) called the Henson House, and it
ran TriBBS. And yes, I was a LORD fanatic. There would be a monthly
competition for a free subscription while playing that game, and I always
won. And you know what, I think Violet was a little too easy.
Anyway, eventually the Sysop of that BBS was stricken with the Internet bug,
and suddenly TriBBS was not good enough. He ended up switching to Wildcat!
5, where we lost our door games, but he could maintain a connection to the
Internet, providing it to us[1]. So long LORD, hello Telnet.
I ran across the Telnet menu because I was one of the primary users of the
BBS, and so I explored it first (it only had two lines). On the list, I ran
across a few 'games'...one of them was Allanthya [mad.eshores.com 4000, to
mindcryme.com 4000, now at allanthya.org 4000] at the time[2].
Allanthya was a great place to start out[3]. It was my introduction to the
MUDding world, and I was addicted. I found a few of my classmates MUDded
there, and so it got competitive. One of my classmates said "when I immort,
I want to build a tree zone ..."
Then I was really hooked. I wanted to immort, I wanted to build. I did
both, and I also did many things that showed my maturity level at the
time[4]. Anyway, after being an immortal, not, back again, oops - gone,
here I am... a number of times, I decided to develop my own MUD.
My biggest problem? I didn't know one bit of C. I picked CircleMUD for the
codebase because Allanthya was CircleMUD, no other real reason[5]. Anyway,
that led me to teach myself coding (_NOT_ recommended), and I had several
projects I started and dropped.
I also began releasing code to the CircleMUD community.
Now I'm almost up to date. Me and a friend of mine (and other
ex-Allanthyans :P) decided to create a MUD based on Donaldson's "Covenant"
books[6]. It's working quite well.
Thanks Jeremy, George, and the DIKU group.
-k.
[1] - he dialed up to an ISP, we dialed up to him. Not the greatest setup,
but it was cheap.
[2] - there's a plug for your MUD, Melen.
[3] - not that it's not a great placve to play now. It's more of a social
MUD (gossip channel runs constantly) and role-play doesn't work too well.
But hey, if that floats your boat, go here.
[4] - my impulsive actions toward having my own MUD showed I was, well,
impulsive. Luckily, I got a job with an internet cafe who was just starting
up their own ISP--that gave me real Internet access, and money to work with.
[5] - glad I did. I download other codebases as I run across them. As far
as I can see, there isn't another that's more readable.
[6] - very good books. Read them. And read them 57 more times. I've had
to have gone through them at LEAST that much.
[7] - wow, footnote your e-mails -- I can do it too.
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