There was once a virtual world called LambdaMOO. It began when a researcher named Pavel Curtis recreated his Californian house inside a virtual space in a Californian computer, but the space was open to other players connecting from around the world. You could connect with a named avatar, chat, walk around and punch things by typing text commands -
Back up. It doesn't sound impressive now, but it happened in 1990. This was the year of the first Wing Commander game, of the first Secret of Monkey Island. It was the year that a computer scientist in Geneva was writing the first web browser, and the year before the first website. The ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro were still on sale. It was before Internet Explorer, before home Internet access, five years before the first graphical MMO. You connected to LambdaMOO via Telnet and a green screen terminal.
It wasn't the first text-based virtual world. There'd been a number of text-based MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) in the 80s. These were LambdaMOO's immediate ancestors - the MOO stood for MUD, Object Oriented'. Curtis was working for PARC, a division of Xerox which did advanced, experimental, unexpected things. (PARC invented an alarming number of things, including fripperies like the laser printer and the mouse.) LambdaMOO was an attempt to see if something serious could be built out of online social environments like MUDs. Which were obviously trivial things of limited interest, back then.
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