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 used to be a useful Wikipedia article about TinyMUD, but it was turned to garbage by clueless editors so I no longer link to 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.
Brigadoon Day 35 is over
Brigadoon Day 35 is over, but mark your calendars for Tuesday, August 19, 2025 (and spread the word) for Brigadoon Day 36.
If you're looking for some place to hang out until then, come visit Finrod's mush TwilightZone at muds.toccobrator.com 9901. If you'd like to arrange a tour of TinyMUD Classic, please contact him there (and possibly wait for him to deidle). If for some obscure reason you're actually interested in working on the ancient TinyMUD source, you can also contact him there.
Administrative note: due to a bug in the startup script, database changes on Brigadoon Day 29 and back a few years weren't carried through to the next year's database. Apologies to anyone whose new character was lost.
-- Finrod(#72810)
PS: On a personal note, over these years there are a number of people whom I haven't seen in too long of a time. This list is not exhaustive, just the names I can currently remember. Any of you are welcome on TwilightZone (for a few of you, welcome back) at any time.
Mav
Blackbird
Bishop_III
Insane_Hermit
Automatic_Jack
Captain_Quiche
Nymph
Jerry_Cornelius
fur
CindyBrady/Cindersoul/Babs_Bendix
Pickles
Sidaria
Irielle
Nyssa
Adrick
Other old muds that are usually up year-round:
DruidMuck: druidmuck.egbt.org 4201 DruidMuck's host's net went flaky. If anyone has an update on it, please let me know.
(EVIL!)Mud: evil.xibo.com 4201
CaveMUCK: cavemuck.jameslick.com 2283
Additional places where Classic-era mudders can be found:
Finrod's mush, TwilightZone: muds.toccobrator.com 9901
CaveMUSH: cavemush.com 6116
The Underground (based on Labyrinth): rhost.blueaether.com 7000 now at labby.mushpark.com 7000
RhostsDev: iweb.localecho.net rhostdev.mushpark.com 4201 NEW as of August 2019
Previous Brigadoon Days of note
Brigadoon Day 33: House in chaos
Brigadoon Day 32: Still Not Canceled By COVID
Brigadoon Day 31: Not Canceled By COVID
Brigadoon Day 28: Solar Eclipse special
Brigadoon Day 23: Return to tinymud-1.5.4f source
Brigadoon Days 20-22 canceled due to technical issues
Brigadoon Day 15: switch to t33ny source
Brigadoon Day 9: first by Finrod using teeny2 source
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 used to be listed on wikipedia, until the wikipedia editor clique removed them, because the cretins somehow think offline documentation of online activity written by people who weren't there and don't know anyone that was but have the capability to write research papers and/or books is superior for some utterly brain-dead reason. Screw 'em. If anyone wants to write up anything informative about mud clients, let me know and I will host it here.
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, sorry.