AberMUD was the first popular

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

MUD. It was named after the town Aberystwyth, in which it was written. The first version was written in B by Alan Cox, Richard Acott, Jim Finnis, and Leon Thrane based at

University of Wales, Aberystwyth , mottoeng = A world without knowledge is no world at all , established = 1872 (as ''The University College of Wales'') , former_names = University of Wales, Aberystwyth , type = Public , endowment = ...

for an old

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

and opened in 1987. The gameplay was heavily influenced by ''

MUD1 ''Multi-User Dungeon'', or ''MUD'' (referred to as ''MUD1'', to distinguish it from its successor, ''MUD2'', and the MUD genre in general), is the first MUD. History MUD was created in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the Universi ...

'', created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the

University of Essex The University of Essex is a public research university in Essex, England. Established by royal charter in 1965, Essex is one of the original plate glass universities. Essex's shield consists of the ancient arms attributed to the Kingdom of Es ...

, which Alan Cox had played. In late 1988, ''AberMUD'' was ported to C by Alan Cox so it could run on

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

at Southampton University's Maths machines. This version was named ''AberMUD2''. In early 1989, there were three instances of ''AberMUD'' running in the UK, the Southampton one, one at

Leeds University , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

and a third at the IBM PC User Group in London, run by Ian Smith. In January 1989 Michael Lawrie sent a licensed copy of ''AberMUD3'' to Vijay Subramaniam and Bill Wisner, both American '' Essex MIST'' players. Bill Wisner subsequently spread ''AberMUD'' around the world. ''AberMUD3'' was renamed ''AberMUD II'' by Rich Salz in February 1989 after he cleaned up the source code and ported it to UNIX. In 1991, Alan Cox wrote ''AberMUD IV'' (unrelated to ''AberMUD 4'') and then ''AberMUD V'', which was also used, with graphical extensions, in the ''Elvira'' game by ''Horror Soft'', a trading name of Adventure Soft. ''AberMUD V'' was later released under the

GNU GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

. ''AberMUD4'' was improved by Alf Salte and Gjermund "Nicknack" Sørseth to create ''

Dirt Dirt is an unclean matter, especially when in contact with a person's clothes, skin, or possessions. In such cases, they are said to become dirty. Common types of dirt include: * Debris: scattered pieces of waste or remains * Dust: a genera ...

''. Their May 1993 final release of ''Dirt 3.1.2'' is used by most of the remaining AberMUD games on the internet. AberMUD's legacy lives on in the three major

codebase In software development, a codebase (or code base) is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code files; thus, a codeba ...

s it inspired: TinyMUD,

LPMud LPMud, abbreviated LP, is a family of MUD server software. Its first instance, the original LPMud game driver, was developed in 1989 by Lars Pensjö (hence the LP in LPMud). LPMud was innovative in its separation of the MUD infrastructure into ...

and DikuMUD.

References

External links

A mostly complete history of the AberMUD V packages

Manual for AberMUD V
the introduction contains a lot of history about who wrote what.

{{MUDs History of computing in the United Kingdom MUD games MUD servers Aberystwyth University Video games developed in the United Kingdom Science and technology in Wales

See also

References

External links