AberMUD was the first popular open source 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 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 Univ ...

'', created by

Roy Trubshaw ''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 Unive ...

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 ''De ...

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, an ...

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 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 c ...

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 InterNetNews (INN) is a Usenet news server package, originally released by Rich Salz in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992 USENIX conference in San Antonio, Texas. It was the first news server with integrated NNTP functionality. While pr ...

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 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 gener ...

''. 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 codeb ...

s it inspired:

TinyMUD A MUD (; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain) is a Multiplayer video game, multiplayer Time-keeping systems in games#Real-time, real-time virtual world, usually Text-based game, text-bas ...

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 DikuMUD is a multiplayer text-based role-playing game, which is a type of multi-user domain ( MUD). It was written in 1990 and 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Stærfeldt at DIKU (''Datalogisk ...

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