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's MUDdex 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.

TinyMUD Classic is currently down

TinyMUD Classic is down for the season. Come back next August (probably the 19th or the 20th) for the 24th Annual Brigadoon Day.


     -- Finrod(#72810)


Other old muds that are usually up year-round:

DruidMuck: druidmuck.egbt.org 4201

(EVIL!)Mud: evil.xibo.com 4201 -- currently down

CaveMUCK: cavemuck.jameslick.com 2283


23rd Annual Brigadoon Day for 2012: Flashback to 2004

TinyMUD Classic is going through its third, and with any luck final, server change: back to the original final TinyMUD source, 1.5.4f. Unfortunately, the database that I started with the second server source in 2004 was not recoverable, so:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Everyone's password has reverted to 'password' like it did back in 2004. If you created a new character or did anything on or after 2004, it will be gone.

But, I'm happy to say that the problems that kept Classic dark for the last three years should be in the past for good now. Classic is running on the same code it ran on back then, so compatibility is certainly not an issue any more. 18M database dumps and 28M process sizes just don't scare even obsolete hardware now.

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.


Obsolete news: New for 2004

TeenyMUD 2.0 has been punted in favor of t33ny: an updated Teeny 1.x courtesy of Andrew Molitor/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.