I am happy with this DECSystem-10 MUD system for now; it's been a 35-year task.

If anyone is bored enough to be curious!

31 January 1991: Essex University's DECSystem-10 closes, meaning that MIST and ROCK, and the dodgy version of MUD we had on there, had to close. I had a mostly working VMS system that would run it with some extra programming, but I'd already sent out AberMUD to Vijay, and he'd sent it out to the world, and TinyMUDs were becoming common. MIST was losing its captive audience, and it needed that level of addiction and co-dependence to run, so I decided to let it die in its prime, rather than become a sad old relic that nobody played.

Sometime in 2004/2005 and the next 20 years: I decided to build a TOPS-10 system on a VMS machine and install MIST/MUD and ROCK. Got quite a long way, and then discovered there was no BCPL compiler existing anywhere in the known world. A few years later, Richard Bartle told me that Paul Allen (I think) had found one. So this became possible, and Quentin (dot-co-dot-uk) took a great stab at it with some really old code, and Viktor Toth had BL running, so I figured that was enough. Sometime in this period, Bletchley Park got something that looked like a PDP-10, and they suggested that I go and put MUD onto it for the museum. It wasn't a PDP-10, but I did look into putting it onto a VAX for a while, but the management of Bletchley, as it turned into The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was getting more corporate and boring, so I gave up bothering.

19th Feb to 22nd Feb, 2026: I decided to build a PRIMOS machine on a Simh emulator for no apparent reason. It went fairly smoothly, so I wondered again about a DEC-10. I was missing TOPS-10 anyway, so why not? Proof of concept, setting up some test systems, seeing where TOPS-10 emulators were at these days and seeing how far Quentin had really got and how much extra work was needed. Realised I am going to have to start from scratch, mostly, using a prebuilt Steuben distro of TOPS-10 7.03 as the base.

Took a couple of weeks off to ponder whether the rest was worth it, but decided my $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription may as well pay for itself with background research, so I decided to go ahead.

9th March 9 to 18th March, 2026: A long spring, and I mostly got it all working. 92 hours of concentrated swearing and about 15 hours of destroying the planet with GPT Deep Research mode later, after at least 2 false starts and complete wipes. I got a system I am relatively happy with. Somewhere in there is about 4 hours of relearning TECO and fighting with getting ROCK working on code it was never meant to work on. There's still more to do, but that's just maintenance now.

BUT I FOUND ROCK! I thought it was lost forever. Somehow, that's my major victory in all this. Building the setup was hard, tedious, and very frustrating work. It probably did need somebody who knew a lot about both DEC and Unix systems management, and the MUD engine, to guide it, but it was still mostly a matter of putting together things that already existed and forcing them to work together. ROCK, though, I genuinely thought was 100% lost.

It's taken a hundred plus concentrated hours, two new dedicated hosts, a small town's water supply, and probably a few megawatts of power in the background. But this is the final re-creation of the systems I closed at the start of the 1990s.

MIST (and MUD and ROCK) will still probably end up as relics that nobody properly plays, but this project is not pretending to be anything other than an interesting throwback and museum piece now, which, 35 years after I closed it down, seems a fitting end. It also means I can resurrect Duncan Rogerson's arch-wizard, and that seems right, somehow. I will leave it up and running now.

#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security #TNMOC #blog #ADHD #Autism

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Old Man Yells At Cloud (Abe Simpson shaking his fist at the world)

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A 1970 brochure showing the typical layout of a DECSystem 10. Showing 17 large cabinets, and a console. There's no chair or hatstand in here to throw the tape rings at, it doesn't seem realistic.