[hazeii]

Way back in the day (1985) I was figuring out how to do timeslicing on a 4MHz Z80, and once I had it working on multiple terminals I slung a simple MUD on it (Shades). Connecting it to a couple of modems (this was the days when BB's were the thing) got people playing, at which point British Telecom's Prestel/Micronet decided they'd like to run it on their system.

The demand was sufficient that it kept crashing the entire national network, and one of my prize memories from back then is the night I was working late in this huge multistorey BT building (Baynard House) in London stuffed with big cabinets filled with computers and modems, and as I was huddled over my little Z80 the double doors burst open and the shift leader stormed in, shouting "There is NO WAY I'm going to put up with your system taking down the entire network". So I looked down my little Z80 box, then looked up at the seried ranks of GEC computers in their 48U cabinets, and did my best to puzzled, in a "Who, little ole me?" kind of way.

Ok, so it was 1200 baud max per user but we did get up to 128 users spread over 2 Z80s, each with 256Kb bankswitched RAM and 2Mb hand-made RAM disks.

The rest of it is a long story but it's still around [0] and I know a few people on here remember it (fondly I hope - though I do still feel guilty about those bills!).

[0] http://games.world.co.uk/shades/

[OakNinja]

Thank you for sharing, awesome read!

[drzaiusapelord]

Pre-90s dial-up MUDs sound fascinating to me. Do you know of any others?

[EMM_386]

Check out MUD1, which eventually became British Legends on CompuServe and was rather popular in the late 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1

[Mauricebranagh]

Hi Hazeii

LTNS I remember playing on shades (TG and Prestel) and going to some of the meets with Cuthulu (we both worked for Telecom Gold / Prestel)

I was Mouser on Shades I believe

[hazeii]

Hi! Those meets were great fun (though one or two did get a bit out of hand :) )

Just logged and checked, your account is still active on Shades. Quite a few of the old names log in from time to time, maybe we'll have to organise a virtual meet one of these days.