[CLUE-Talk] FCC Deregulation Debate

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 01-30 05:43, bill ehlert wrote:
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> --- "Jed S. Baer" <thag at frii.com> wrote:
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>    . . .
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> > regulation, some of which are strong societal
> > norms, e.g. MUDs. But it
> 
> **  have heard of  FUD  (far too much of it
>     going around) but what is  MUD  ??

Everything2 has a good definition (actually, the Jargon File's definition):

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=mud

MUD /muhd/ n.

[acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension] 1. A class of
virtual reality experiments accessible via the Internet. These are real-time
chat forums with structure; they have multiple `locations' like an adventure
game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic
system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the
database that represents the existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD. The
acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going
mudding', etc.

Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form)
derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of
Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that game still exist
today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUDs. There is a widespread
myth (repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon) that the
name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British
Telecom (the motto: "You haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however,
this is false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain
in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims
on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth.

Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD
concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these
had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these
had an image as `research' they often survived administrative hostility to
BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds were often
spotty and difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish
social interaction there.

AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly
gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large hacker
communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers
see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave
of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize social interaction,
puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition
(in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes referred to as `MU*', with
`MUD' implicitly reserved for the more game-oriented ones). By 1991, over
50% of MUD sites were of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the
combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of
TinyMud. In 1996 the cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO,
even more extensible using a built-in object-oriented language. The trend
toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.

The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new
simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991 there was
an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer designs
exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different
simulation styles being explored. It survived. See also bonk/oif, FOD,
link-dead, mudhead, talk mode.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.


-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at americanisp.net  
http://users.americanisp.net/~seanleblanc/
Get MLAC at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlac/
Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small 
jumps. 
-David Lloyd George