8 Dec
2000
8 Dec
'00
9:02 a.m.
Just having a moment of nostalgia here..
Anyone remember having a multi-player D&D/MUD like game dial-up
service in their city? I'm thinking around 1985 or earlier... it was
some sort of a timeshare system with 8/16/24 ports that people could
dial in to at an hourly rate and play. As I recall it was some sort of
franchise and we had one here in Milwaukee (414 area code) that was
quite popular- I believe it was called Sceptre, but I'm not sure if that
was the name of the game/world/town, etc.
Just wondering what kind of hardware & software was hosting this game;
it was quite addictive (or perhaps I was mesmerized by trying to use an
80-column terminal on a C64).
Thanks,
--
-------------------------------------------------------
Ryan K. Brooks V: 414-908-9011
r(a)hack.net F: 707-885-4944
Chief Scientist / Time Warner Telecom N9YBX
8 Dec
8 Dec
9:44 a.m.
Anyone remember having a multi-player D&D/MUD
like game dial-up
service in their city? I'm thinking around 1985 or earlier... it was
some sort of a timeshare system with 8/16/24 ports that people could
dial in to at an hourly rate and play. As I recall it was some sort of
franchise and we had one here in Milwaukee (414 area code) that was
quite popular- I believe it was called Sceptre, but I'm not sure if that
was the name of the game/world/town, etc.
I seem to recall such a system running here in the Pacific Northwest. It
started out as PPS - Pirates of Puget Sound, then went to calling
themselves Polynet Public Systems. It all started on Apple ][ class
machines and eventually moved into some kind of Unix machine for the
larger multi-player D&D game/bbs they had going. I know of two systems
named GSPPS and BSPPS for sure, but I'm VERY fuzzy on the rest.
g.
10:31 a.m.
Just having a moment of nostalgia here..
Anyone remember having a multi-player D&D/MUD like game dial-up
service in their city? I'm thinking around 1985 or earlier... it was
some sort of a timeshare system with 8/16/24 ports that people could
dial in to at an hourly rate and play. As I recall it was some sort of
franchise and we had one here in Milwaukee (414 area code) that was
quite popular- I believe it was called Sceptre, but I'm not sure if that
was the name of the game/world/town, etc.
The Sceptre of Goth. I forget its original name, but it was originally
written in BASIC with additional assembly language pieces. originally
written on and for the MECC computer (Minnesota Educational Computer
Consortium, or something like that) which was a Control Data Cyber
system that was connected to remote terminals in various High Schools
across the state of Minnesota. there were MANY games written on that
system, many of which were multi-user.
The program was running well before 1981 when I started attending classes
at the University of Minnesota (which had its own Cybers of course, but
word gets around...). later the game was commercialized in several cities.
if i recall correctly, it was written by Alan Klietz? To add new castles
(areas) the game had to be taken down and recompiled.
Of course, at the U of Minnesota, the game of choice was Karnath, a HUGE
3D cube of rooms, multi-user, the maze being randomly generated when the
person who ran the game decided to start a new game.
And for the lucky devils who worked downtown at CDC headquarters, the
game of choice was probably Archon (?) or whatever it was called, it
used line drawing plato terminals to visually show a 3D maze, and you
could talk with other players at other sites, etc.
-Lawrence LeMay
Just wondering what kind of hardware & software was hosting this game;
it was quite addictive (or perhaps I was mesmerized by trying to use an
80-column terminal on a C64).
Thanks,
--
-------------------------------------------------------
Ryan K. Brooks V: 414-908-9011
r(a)hack.net F: 707-885-4944
Chief Scientist / Time Warner Telecom N9YBX
10:42 a.m.
Wow... classiccmp comes through again! Thanks Lawrence!
Do you know how it went from UM to commercial? I assume some sort of company
owned the rights?
Thanks,
Ryan
Lawrence LeMay wrote:
--
-------------------------------------------------------
Ryan K. Brooks V: 414-908-9011
r(a)hack.net F: 707-885-4944
Chief Scientist / Time Warner Telecom N9YBX
Just having a
moment of nostalgia here..
Anyone remember having a multi-player D&D/MUD like game dial-up
service in their city? I'm thinking around 1985 or earlier... it was
some sort of a timeshare system with 8/16/24 ports that people could
dial in to at an hourly rate and play. As I recall it was some sort of
franchise and we had one here in Milwaukee (414 area code) that was
quite popular- I believe it was called Sceptre, but I'm not sure if that
was the name of the game/world/town, etc.
The Sceptre of Goth. I forget its original name, but it was originally
written in BASIC with additional assembly language pieces. originally
written on and for the MECC computer (Minnesota Educational Computer
Consortium, or something like that) which was a Control Data Cyber
system that was connected to remote terminals in various High Schools
across the state of Minnesota. there were MANY games written on that
system, many of which were multi-user.
The program was running well before 1981 when I started attending classes
at the University of Minnesota (which had its own Cybers of course, but
word gets around...). later the game was commercialized in several cities.
if i recall correctly, it was written by Alan Klietz? To add new castles
(areas) the game had to be taken down and recompiled.
Of course, at the U of Minnesota, the game of choice was Karnath, a HUGE
3D cube of rooms, multi-user, the maze being randomly generated when the
person who ran the game decided to start a new game.
And for the lucky devils who worked downtown at CDC headquarters, the
game of choice was probably Archon (?) or whatever it was called, it
used line drawing plato terminals to visually show a 3D maze, and you
could talk with other players at other sites, etc.
-Lawrence LeMay
>
> Just wondering what kind of hardware & software was hosting this game;
> it was quite addictive (or perhaps I was mesmerized by trying to use an
> 80-column terminal on a C64).
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------
> Ryan K. Brooks V: 414-908-9011
> r(a)hack.net F: 707-885-4944
> Chief Scientist / Time Warner Telecom N9YBX
>
> 
10:37 a.m.
Just having a moment of nostalgia here..
Anyone remember having a multi-player D&D/MUD like game dial-up
service in their city? I'm thinking around 1985 or earlier... it was
some sort of a timeshare system with 8/16/24 ports that people could
dial in to at an hourly rate and play. As I recall it was some sort of
AFAIK the first one was in Essex (UK), and that was ported to Compuserve
fairly soon and called British Legends. Lots of smaller, simpler stuff was
running on dailup BBS, I remember Bushido, tradewars, and a few others.
Real muds were running at a LOT of campuses, and locally a huge BBS called
I think Liberty was running something.
Even Compuserve British Legends was empty once in awhile late at night,
which was the problem with a lot of the systems. Much of the time zero
human interaction, just playing against the NPC (non player something,
character maybe). After one month where I played more than sleeping or
working combined, I quit cold turkey, and haven't mud much since. Online
first person shooter games have what most people really wanted anyway,
action and lots of it, with no hourly charges.
****************** Here is a VERY good link, and a snippet
http://www.ludd.luth.se/mud/aber/mud-history.html
Milieu was originally written for a CDC Cyber owned by the Minnesota
Educational Computer Consortium. High school students from around the
state were given access to the machine for educational purposes; they
often ended up writing chat programs and games instead. I am uncertain
of the precise time frame, but I believe Milieu probably predates MUD.
Eventually, Alan Klietz ported the game from Pascal to C and wrote an
implementation that would run on an IBM PC XT running a multitasking
operating system called QNX. Alan and a few other people formed a
company called GamBits Timesharing, attached sixteen modems to an XT,
and started selling time on it. The game, now called The Scepter of
Goth (or The Scepter and The Phoenix, or just Scepter) was now
publically available. The GamBits system had bulletin boards, mail,
11:42 a.m.
Ryan K. Brooks writes:
Anyone remember having a multi-player D&D/MUD
like game dial-up
service in their city? I'm thinking around 1985 or earlier... it was
some sort of a timeshare system with 8/16/24 ports that people could
dial in to at an hourly rate and play. As I recall it was some sort of
franchise and we had one here in Milwaukee (414 area code) that was
quite popular- I believe it was called Sceptre, but I'm not sure if that
was the name of the game/world/town, etc.
The MUD was called "The Scepter of Goth". However, that was just one
of the games available on the GameMaster, which is probably the system
you're thinking of. GameMaster was an XT running QNX, with special
multi-modem cards that only allowed 300 baud dial-ins.
At the time, I was looking into possibly setting up a similar system just
outside New York City, by either buying a franchise or just the source
code so I could port it to a Unix box. However, I spoke to GameMaster's
operator (Jim?) on the phone a few times and he managed to talk me out
it. Apparently he was being jerked in various directions after having
invested over $7000 in hardware, software and telephone lines. He said
he wasn't allowed access to the source code so he could make changes
or improvements.
But it was a pretty neat MUD.
Andy
1:11 p.m.
Anyone remember having a multi-player D&D/MUD
like game dial-up
service in their city? I'm thinking around 1985 or earlier... it was
some sort of a timeshare system with 8/16/24 ports that people could
dial in to at an hourly rate and play. As I recall it was some sort of
franchise and we had one here in Milwaukee (414 area code) that was
quite popular- I believe it was called Sceptre, but I'm not sure if that
was the name of the game/world/town, etc.
ca. 1985 chat lines were starting to be popular. The ones I frequented
when I was in Madison, WI weren't really D&D type things or MUDs as such.
The BeeLine was Apple II based. Don't know what hardware exactly. I
was bigger into Warlord Chat which was an IBM PC talking to 4 Atari 400s
each handling 2 modems. The PC-Atari interface was an impressive bit of
wire wrap, or so I was told. I never saw it first hand.
Eric
8623
days inactive
8623
days old
6 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
ahm＠spies.com -
geneb＠deltasoft.com -
korpela＠ellie.ssl.berkeley.edu -
lemay＠cs.umn.edu -
mikeford＠socal.rr.com -
ryan＠hack.net