AberMUD
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
AberMUD was the first popular internet-based MUD. The first version was written in B by Alan Cox for an old Honeywell mainframe and opened in 1987. In 1988 it was ported to C and to UNIX. This version (AberMUD 3) was made freely available to the world and as a result became the first popular MUD on the Internet.
AberMUD was however far from the original MUD. The authors played the University of Essex MUD1 written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle several years earlier, and the gameplay (although not the game world) were heavily influenced by MUD1.
There were numerous variants extended and ported over the years, including one for the even more obscure Dell UNIX SVR4 on x86 hardware during the early 1990s.
AberMUD 3 was rewritten by Rich Salz and others to create an "AberMUD 4". This was rewritten to be far more efficient by Alf and Nicknack whose system "Dirt" is now used by most of the remaining AberMUD games on the internet.
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 Horrorsoft (renamed to Adventuresoft and then doing adventure games like Simon the Sorcerer series and The Feeble Files). AberMUD V was later released under the GPL.
AberMUD is named after the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. About twenty AberMUDs remain in operation, but even as of 2002, they have few players.
