A while back I spoke about running a TinyMud party.

I was lucky enough to find the initial (or as close as I could get) source. Version: 1.4.1 and commented “–Jim Aspnes, December 9th, 1989”. I eventually managed to get the code compiled again, it wasn’t too bad a job, hampered by the fact I hadn’t been near C for quite some time! After spending some time playing I noted that the accompanying documentation “Three’s Unabridged Dictionary of Commands” (Last Updated Thu May 31 13:37:43 CDT 1990) had commands which the 1.4.1 version didn’t recognise.

More trawling of the Internet… I found the Islandia source, last change comment: “–Michael Mauldin & Russ Smith, June 25, 1990.    1.5.4f”. This (after looking through the code) had the extra commands and a whole lot more “features”, wonderfully #defined in/out. Anyway, tonight I finally got this running, I suspect I need to revisit some of my changes, I whacked GCC up to maximum on the warning levels etc. and I probably perverted some of the logic on the way!

Its a shame, I cannot find the sweet spot of code where it had less adventurous features added, specifically in/around the “1.5.3” version, ho hum. I guess it might be out there? Anyway, its running and I’m probably one of a small number of people who has seen its output since 1990, so here it is:

Now I just need to play with it and see whether I should run the really early version or this. I’m so used to unit tests etc. I’m paranoid something is broken and the later code is really fragile. For now I will just sit with the warm glow of seeing a bit of computing history re-awakened.