TinyMUD
From Mudpedia
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TinyMUD was a popular open source MUD codebase written by James Aspnes in 1989. TinyMUD was inspired by Monster and AberMUD, and first announced on August 19, 1989. What distinguished TinyMUD from other MUDs was the ability of players to build and create their own rooms, objects, and puzzles in the game. Seven months later, on April 29, 1990, Aspnes announced TinyMUD's closure due to the process size exceeding the memory limit of 32 megabytes on the host system. The MUD itself came to be known as "TinyMUD Classic" or simply "Classic", or occasionally "DaisyMUD" since in the final days of its first incarnation, it ran on a computer named "daisy". To distance itself from the traditional combat orientated MUDs it was said that the "D" in TinyMUD stood for Multi-User "Domain" or "Dimension", which led to the eventual adoption of the term MU* to refer to TinyMUD and its many derivatives.[1]
TinyMUD's database was briefly resurrected as "PlanckMUD", named after the new machine it was running on, by Bruce Woodcock on October 8, 1990. Subsequently renamed "TinyMUD Classic", the goal of this project was to clean up and revive the database, as well as serve as a method of stress-testing the new server it was running on. While the revival was controversial among many TinyMUD players, the new version was more popular than the original. TinyMUD was shut down again on December 11, 1990 when permission to use the new server was revoked. This version of the TinyMUD database is believed to have been subsequently lost.
On August 20, 1990, the administrator of what was then the most popular TinyMUD, Islandia, took down their MUD and put TinyMUD Classic up in its place for the day, calling it "Brigadoon Day", a reference to the musical Brigadoon, about a mythical village in Scotland that only appears for one day every 100 years. Since then, it has become a tradition to bring back old muds on August 19 or August 20 for the day. TinyMUD Classic has reappeared at this time every year from 1998 to the present at toccobrator.com.
Popular derivatives of TinyMUD are TinyMush by Larry Foard, PennMUSH, TinyMUCK by Stephen White, TinyMUX, TinyMUSE, and SMUG by Jim Aspnes and others. TinyMUCK, TinyMUSH, and TinyMUX are now said to stand for "Multi-User Created Kingdom", "Multi-User Shared Hallucination", and "Multi-User eXperience", but these are backronyms; originally they were simple plays on MUD. Other MUD servers like UberMUD, UnterMUD, TeenyMUD and MOO were written by TinyMUD participants but are not directly derived from the TinyMUD code.
Since the original launch of TinyMUD Classic hundreds of MUDs based on TinyMUD and its derivatives have existed, of which PennMUSH and TinyMUSH are two of the most widely used derivatives.
[edit] References
- ↑ Richard Bartle (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. pp. 741. ISBN 0131018167. "TinyMUD was deliberately intended to be distanced from the prevailing hack-and-slay AberMUD style, and the "D" in its name was said to stand for "Dimension" (or, occasionally, "Domain") rather than "Dungeon;" this is the ultimate cause of the MUD/MU* distinction that was to arise some years later."
