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 here

Brigadoon Day 35 has begun-- thirty-five years of TinyMUD, who would ever have thought. Point your mud clients at muds.toccobrator.com port 4201 to connect. If you haven't been around for Brigadoon Day in the last 10 years, you'll need to reset your password, since all passwords were reset to 'password' as part of what should be the very last server move, back to the original tinymud 1.5.4f source that it ran on when it was up in 1990. Noisy whispers are on, just like in the old days. Unfortunately, since the last server code ate the db, any changes from 2005 to 2011 were lost, so if you created a new character in that timeframe, you'll have to create it again.

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 27: Kate Memorial

Brigadoon Day 23: Return to tinymud-1.5.4f source

Brigadoon Days 20-22 canceled due to technical issues

Brigadoon Day 17: snooze(#100899) Memorial

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.