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by stevoski
341 days ago
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Wow, this is still a thing! I lost two university friends to the Discworld MUD. As in, their whole lifestyle, hours, and activities changed to be working on and playing it all night long in the uni labs, and they no longer did anything else apart from attend a bare minimum of classes. I just checked the “About” page, and one of them (“pinkfish”) is at the top of the Administrators list. |
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In late 1994 my only Internet access was a small room at Uni with 2 unattended ancient 286 PCs someone had set up for international students to check their emails but was always empty. Soon I joined a group of eager undergraduates that squatted unused email accounts, shared Slackware floppies, waited hours for a 700Kb NASA pic to download or frequented MUDs, telnet chats or places like Brinta BBS.
We quickly organized to share them fairly, until two big Math graduate students in full scary Heavy Metal rocker regalia showed up and started hogging them for 10 hours a day to play a MUD. No one to complain to, since our own usage was unsanctioned.
After a couple weeks of this, I made a little C trojan horse that replaced the telnet executable and logged the credentials if the target was the MUD in question. Then I would take the earliest chance available to delete their characters. They were gone after a week.