AberMUD

AberMUD was the first popular open source MUD. The first version was written in B by Alan Cox, Richard Acott, Jim Finnis, and Leon Thrane based at University of Wales, Aberystwyth for an old Honeywell mainframe and opened in 1987. [cite web
url=http://groups.google.com/group/alt.mud/msg/321996d7ca69ec41
title=AberMUD-4
author=Michael Lawrie
year=1990
quote=The Software, both source code, design and scenario are copyright Alan Cox,Richard Acott, Jim Finnis, And Leon Thrane, save for the Blizzard pass sectionof the scenario which is (C)1988 Alan Cox, save for versions of the scenarioon the ZX Spectrum 128K microcomputer. (C) 1987/88 All rights reserved.]

Alan Cox had played the University of Essex MUD1 written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, and the gameplay was heavily influenced by MUD1. [cite web
url=http://www.iol.ie/~ecarroll/mud/mr_5b#sect_5_4
title=5. Reviews -- Restf of the World
author=Eddy Carroll
quote=Cox was a player of MUD1 who wrote AberMUD while a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.]

In late 1988 AberMUD was ported to C by Alan Cox so it could run on UNIX at Southampton University's Maths machines. This version was named AberMUD2. [cite web
url=http://www.ircnet.org/History/jarkko-mjl.html
title=Parallels in MUD and IRC History
author=Michael Lawrie
year=2002
quote=He did this on Southampton University's Maths machines thanks to a chap called Pete Bentley who ran a bulletin board called SBBS there, and in late 1988, there was a fairly playable game called AberMUD2 up and running.]

In early 1989 there were three instances of AberMUD running in the UK, the Southampton one, one at Leeds University and a third at the IBM PC User Group in London, ran by Ian Smith. In January 1989 Michael Lawrie sent a licenced copy of AberMUD3 to Vijay Subramaniam and Bill Wisner, both American Essex MIST players. [cite web
url=http://lorry.org/arch-wizard/history.html
title=Escape from the Dungeon
author=Michael Lawrie
year=2003
quote=I had also taken over a new game called AberMUD that two of my wizards, Anarchy (Alan Cox) and Moog (Richard Acott) had originally written at Aberyswyth University and Alan was now converting to Unix at Southampton University. Alan ended up taking a year out so I took on AberMUD and roped in a couple of programmers in to help keep the thing maintained and expanded. [...] In 1991, I sent a copy of AberMUD to Vijay Subramaniam and Bill Wisner (our only two American MIST wizards) and as far as MUDs being generally available to the world, the rest is history which oddly isn't true for the credits in AberMUD since a huge amount of the original authors were removed somewhere.] Bill Wisner subsequently spread AberMUD around the world. [cite web
url=http://lorry.org/Docs/lorry.html
title=A brief history of Lorry
author=Michael Lawrie
year=1997
quote=By 1987, Lorry had taken over the Essex Systems (MUD itself, and the thing he was to become best known for, MIST) and ran them, and just about every other publicly available 'leisure' system on UK academic networks until 1992. Politically, this did me a lot of good, personally, it didn't. Bill Wisner and myself will argue who it actually was who exported MUDs to the rest of the world, I certainly mailed him the first US AberMud distribution, but I reckon that his originally distributing the AberMuds, Diku's and LPMuds makes him far more responsible for this crime against humanity.]

AberMUD3 was extended to create AberMUD4, most notable by Rich Salz. [cite web
url=http://www.iol.ie/~ecarroll/mud/mr_5b#sect_5_4
title=5. Reviews -- Rest of the World
author=Eddy Carroll
quote=The code was made generally available, and was enhanced and added to by several people, most notably Salz.]

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.

AberMUD4 was improved by Alf Salte (Alf), and G.Sorseth (Nicknack) to create Dirt. Their May 1993 final release of Dirt 3.1.2 is used by most of the remaining AberMUD games on the internet. [cite web
url=http://www.abermud.com/index2.html
title=Information and Installation Guide for DIRT 3.1.2
author=Alf Salte, G.Sorseth
quote=The files doc/CHANGELOG-aber-IV and doc/Manual.ms contain changes and info for the old original code, they are obsolescent and are included for historical reasons only.]

AberMUD is named after the town in which it was written, Aberystwyth. About twenty AberMUDs remain in operation, but even as of 2008, they have few players. [cite web
url=http://www.abermud.info/mudlist/showme.php
title=The Client-Server MUDlist system for AberMUDs
author=Alfred S Nathan]

References

External links

* [http://www.abermud.info/mudlist/showme.php List of existent AberMUDs]
* [http://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/alan/Software/Games/AberMUD5 A mostly complete history of the AberMUD V packages]
* [http://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/alan/Software/Games/AberMUD5/DOC/Manual.01 Manual for AberMUD V] : the introduction contains a lot of history about who wrote what.