toccobrator.com: TinyMUD Classic
The first TinyMUD was the identically named TinyMUD, now generally known as TinyMUD Classic. It ran from August 19, 1989 to April 29, 1990. Lauren Burka, aka ashne(#11317), has a short history of early MUDdom called the MUDdex, which has a copy of the messages that announced the beginning and the end of its run. There's also a Wikipedia entry about it.
On August 20, 1990, Fuzzy(#27893) took down Islandia, the most prominent mud of the time, and put up Classic in its place, declaring the first Brigadoon Day. (Curiously enough, there was a Muck called Brigadoon that was popular in late 1990/early 1991.) Since then, on or around August 19-20, it's become popular to bring up old MUDs for the day (or week, or until the person running them gets tired and shuts them back down). In 1998, I took a copy of the now-publically-available copy of the TinyMUD database (James Aspnes, aka Wizard(#1), released it into the public domain) and brought it up under TeenyMUD 2.0, it being the best source that I could find at the time that would run Classic acceptably. Since then, when able, I've been bringing it back up every August.
19th Annual Brigadoon Day: Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The 19th Annual Brigadoon Day is over. Stay tuned for the big 20th, which will start Thursday, August 20, 2009!
-- Finrod(#72810)
17th Annual Brigadoon Day for 2006
snooze(#100899) Memorial
Gregory Joseph Blake, aka snooze(#100899), dinosaur mudder of long standing, passed away on June 5, 2006. He will be greatly missed by all of us. His blog is still up with additional information and memorials.
New for 2004
TeenyMUD 2.0 has been punted in favor of t33ny: an updated Teeny 1.x courtesy of Andrew Molitor, aka bob(#12420). It's the closest thing to what Classic originally ran on that's disk-based. Noisy whispers are on; pages and whispers are also enabled.
Since TeenyMUD 2.0 stored its passwords one-way encrypted, all character passwords have been reset to 'password'. However, all other changes made since 1998 have been preserved. If you were at Classic's DeathDay back in April, your password is whatever you changed it to then.
Clients for connecting to Classic or other muds
Since mudding got started before the rise of Microsoft Windows, most clients are Unix-based. However, there are a number of clients out there for most any operating system. The most popular is TinyFugue; many other mud clients are listed on the Wikipedia page about MUD clients.
You can connect directly to the port via telnet, but depending on your OS, you may experience various levels of disappointment with connecting that way. Windows in particular will exhibit the dread staircase effect, since Unix terminates lines with a LF only, while Windows expects CR+LF; but even without that problem, raw telnet will do no word-wrapping for you, and your input will commingle with your output in a likely undesirable way. It's doable in a pinch but you're probably best off with a MUD client.
Classic is currently down.