Post #1649541

2026-03-17 13:35 UTC

@gulfie Ooh, I thought I knew all the UK games! one to add to my list :) My first one was called MUCK from 1983/1984 running on PRIMOS on a Prime 2250 - It was great, brilliant game-play design (mostly not by me, and Neil Burgess is no longer with us) and I think a pretty innovative multi-user mechanism (I did write that bit :P) - But each move took about 45 seconds, so as people said, it may as well just be a tabletop game that happened to be running on a minicomputer. Humph.

Replies (2)

@gulfie@mastodonapp.uk 2026-03-17 15:25

@lorry it was played by a couple of dozen of us, hacked together C code, it was good fun. I collaborated with another student, Mark Strentz. I’d shudder to go and look at the code now, I basically used it as a mechanism to learn the language. Also fond memories of Rogue and then Hack on our small department Unix server. Research students complaining about us burning CPU cycles over lunchtime when they were trying to run circuit simulations 🤪

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@gulfie@mastodonapp.uk 2026-03-17 15:34

@lorry some of the very smart cookies in CompSci (I was electronics) put together a kinda social network - list of logged in users down the left side, you could chat with an individual or as part of a group, all written on a Harris 800 (no idea what language they used for that). One of my lab technicians was William JG Overington who invented the concept of Telesoftware (the code you could download from Teletext if you had more money than sense and the adapter for the BBC micro).

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