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What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

theatlantic.com

21–30 of 41 posts

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#23
post #7

When I was eleven years old, I discovered a star wars themed lpmud. Mudding led to creating, which led to mudlib hacking, which led to software development. I still get goosebumps when I think about the impact that community had on my life. MUDs tended to be free to play and were run by unix hippies. The line between playing and coders was thin and easily crossed; playing the game led almost inevitably to understandi…

'Unix hippies' - indeed! I just had a flashback to the late eighties - the first MUD I became addicted to was in fact run by a long haired chap with very few teeth. Eventually met up with him at a computer fair that myself and a schoolfriend trekked into London for. I remember being accused ingame of using Macros to run straight to juicy loot after a reset, but no it was just my geeky 14yr old self remembering 40 or so N/S/E/W directions and typing ahead of the 75 baud connection. As if my C64 had macros! Happy Days

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#25
post #7

When I was eleven years old, I discovered a star wars themed lpmud. Mudding led to creating, which led to mudlib hacking, which led to software development. I still get goosebumps when I think about the impact that community had on my life. MUDs tended to be free to play and were run by unix hippies. The line between playing and coders was thin and easily crossed; playing the game led almost inevitably to understandi…

Sodaplay. Nostalgia level: sbemails.

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#26
post #15
post #7

When I was eleven years old, I discovered a star wars themed lpmud. Mudding led to creating, which led to mudlib hacking, which led to software development. I still get goosebumps when I think about the impact that community had on my life. MUDs tended to be free to play and were run by unix hippies. The line between playing and coders was thin and easily crossed; playing the game led almost inevitably to understandi…

KoBra?

Heh, yep. Good times.

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#27
I got my first computer because of a MUD. It was a a group of kids in middle school talking about the MUD they were playing that completely lit my imagination and led to me wheedling my parents for months until they agreed to get one. Of course, I wasn't cool enough and those kids never would tell me what MUD they played on. But I found my own and spent way too much time in it, contributing to my first almost-failing grade in high school.

MUDs were also how I got into IRC.

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#29
post #9
post #7

When I was eleven years old, I discovered a star wars themed lpmud. Mudding led to creating, which led to mudlib hacking, which led to software development. I still get goosebumps when I think about the impact that community had on my life. MUDs tended to be free to play and were run by unix hippies. The line between playing and coders was thin and easily crossed; playing the game led almost inevitably to understandi…

This triggers a memory- I was watching a documentary about the internal combustion engine, and how everybody who drove a car in the early days needed to understand how it worked, because they'd inevitably have to troubleshoot it. Same for old TVs that had to get their tubes replaced from time to time. It's all really interesting.

When I was young, my dad would take the back off the TV, which was a bit dangerous due to the serious capacitance, and take out several tubes. We'd take the tubes to the store, where they had a test machine. It looked a bit like a video game console. Dad would plug in the various tubes, the machine would indicate which was bad, we'd buy a new one, take them all home, dad would plug them all back in, and, et voilà, working TV again.

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#30

It's too bad almost none of the old VRML communities still exist. I wonder if there are backups of CyberTown worlds floating around somewhere...

I learned a lot from Cybertown back in the day. Hiring staff, advertising my block. I learned HTML and CSS so that I could style my block's message board and that eventually led to what I'm doing now, 14 years later.

Nobody knows you're twelve years old in a virtual world. I think at one point I was head of the city's night club.

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