AberMUD was the first popular
open source MUD. It was named after the town
Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth () is a university and seaside town as well as a community in Ceredigion, Wales. Located in the historic county of Cardiganshire, means "the mouth of the Ystwyth". Aberystwyth University has been a major educational location i ...
, 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 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, enterprise ...
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
Richard Allan Bartle FBCS FRSA (born 10 January 1960) is a British writer, professor and game researcher in the massively multiplayer online game industry. He co-created ''MUD1'' (the first MUD) in 1978, and is the author of the 2003 book ''Desi ...
at the
University of Essex, which Alan Cox had played.
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''.
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, run by Ian Smith. In January 1989
Michael Lawrie
Michael Lawrie (born 17 April 1968) is a British computer security and social networking expert known for many things ranging from running MUDs to accidentally being the world's first Cybersquatter. He lives in Cambridge, England where he ...
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
Adventure Soft, previously Horror Soft, was a British video game developer established by Mike Woodroffe, first as an importer and reseller of Adventure International games. The firm operates out of Sutton Coldfield, and is best known for the ' ...
. ''AberMUD V'' was later released under the
GNU GPL.
''AberMUD4'' was improved by Alf Salte and Gjermund "Nicknack" Sørseth 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.
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 code ...
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 a ...
and
DikuMUD.
See also
*
AberMUD family tree
The MUD trees below depict hierarchies of derivation among MUD codebases. Solid lines between boxes indicate code relationships, while dotted lines indicate conceptual relationships. Dotted boxes indicate that the codebase is outside the family de ...
*
MUD
*
Chronology of MUDs
This is a chronological list of notable MUDs with summary information.
__TOC__
Legend
List
References
{{Chronology of role-playing video games
MUDs
Timelines of video games
MUDs
A MUD (; originally multi-user dungeon, ...
*
Wizard (MUD)
Wizard is commonly used in MUDs, particularly LPMuds, AberMUDs and MU*, as a term for the MUD's developers and administrators. The usage originates with Richard Bartle's original ''MUD1'' and ''MUD2''. It is frequently abbreviated "wiz", which ...
References
External links
A mostly complete history of the AberMUD V packagesManual 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