LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) | Hacker News Reader

LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992)

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58 pointsmeanie29 comments

Still don't think I have ever connected to LambdaMOO, although I spent some time on ifMUD which is in the same neighborhood.

Reading these docs now, if I understand right, in between LTAND and LTAND2 was the Mr Bungle/Dr. Jest incident ( https://www.villagevoice.com/2005/10/18/a-rape-in-cyberspace... ), which maybe fills in some of the unspoken context around "We Are Reintroducing Wizardly Fiat" and "The wizards will no longer refrain from taking actions that may have social implications. In three and a half years, no adequate mechanism has been found that prevents disruptive players from creating an intolerably hostile working environment for the wizards. The LTAND ideal that we might somehow limit ourselves solely to technical decisions has proven to be untenable.".

I wonder if that's the whole story or if trolls were a huge problem in that community for the early 90s?

I was there pretty much right at the beginning of LambdaMOO. I left before I ever saw a troll. In fact, this is the first time I actually realised there was ever a problem. It's very sad. It was a great community. Incredibly giving and helpful. Also Pavel Curtis was a really good maintainer. He was always willing to look into reported problems and would always accept patches. If he modified them, he always did it with grace.

Yes, if my rusty memory is correct the Mr Bungle incident was part of the cause for the LTAND2.

But yeah, trolls weren't a huge problem apart from Mr Bungle. There were a few people there who were perma-banned, but not many. Most idiots or trolls connected as Guest characters, so if I recall Guests had a few priviledges removed?

Was such a central part of my life but I don't remember so many details now. I log in every couple years just to do a @who and keep my character alive.

I spent an enormous amount of time on "Snow Crash", a MOO that I think was similar and was popular around the same time. This was in the middle or late 90s. The world was incredibly rich---everything in it was an object that was programmable if you had the right ownership permissions. I don't remember the language it used, or if it even was a standard one, but looking back it was unbelievably robust. I was able to make a "video recorder" that could be turned on, record all the events in a given place, and replay them later to make it all seem like it was happening again; a couple then used this to record their in-world wedding, which I only learned about months later.

I have DESPERATELY searched for years for any commentary on this community slash game, with no luck. I can even remember the telnet address: sapporo.sensemedia.net. Port 8888, maybe? Ah, alas.

Sounds very much like LambdaMOO. Back in the day there were mirror sites you could use if your ping was absurdly high its possible that sapporo host was just a mirror. Snow Crash sounds familiar, but it reminds me of an area inside LambdaMOO. That world was huge, I remember several times ending up in brand new areas that I would spend hours exploring because I never knew how to get back -- I jumped out of a helicopter once, landed on a remote island that had a HUGE underground complex. Another was a party room in the clouds... the imagination could run wild there. I also remember things that could "playback" events (like you could look into a mirror and see who used to be in that room)

This sounds entirely right. Because I also have a recollection of that party room in the clouds. Actually, it's further refreshing my recollection---I think the main area was called "the Sprawl" or something like that? Maybe it WAS just a mirror, and the reason I haven't ever been able to find anyone else talk about it is that I was under a teenage misimpression about the name.

EDIT: AHA. Sensemedia apparently had a virtual community consisting of MANY themed MOOs, termed "The Sprawl," of which Snow was one; ChibaMOO was I guess the famous one, and was based on Neuromancer. This is more progress than I have made on this in years, so thanks!

What blows my mind is that all of this existed almost 30 years ago and nothing quite like it exists today (maybe second life... maybe).

I remember snow crash but I don’t remember much about it. I spent virtually my entire dialup childhood on lambdamoo. Lambda was a giant mansion and you would start in a closet. One of the bottom floors of the mansion had a mirror which replayed things that recently happened in the room. The mansion was huge but I would constantly leave and explore the street. That’s how you ended up in crazy places like a helicopter or random ass island. Still don’t remember how I ended up in someone’s self built house. All I remember is they were having a party and it was freaking awesome reading through everything at 4am hoping my parents wouldn’t barge in and yell at me lol. Good memories :)

If anyone with the handle “dags” sees this, hello from your helicopter buddy

Check out Sindome: https://www.sindome.org/ it's a cyberpunk MOO been online since '97 and is running a modified LambdaMOO.

I remember the Snow Crash MOO! I spent a while there around 1996-1997: it was (despite the name) sort of William Gibson themed - I vaguely remember it being distributed across multiple hosts, and being impressed at the time that it was running on an SGI box. I think the language was standard MOO.

LambdaMoo, BayMoo (and the now defunct ParkMoo) were all favourite haunts of mine in the mid-90s when I was at university. Perhaps I'm feeling nostalgic for those innocent pre-social-media times: I'm in the process of writing a Python "MOO" as a weekend fun project -- a sort of interactive literary world inhabited by other writers / creators / explorers.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, Richard Bartle's "Designing Virtual Worlds" is the classic to read.

I loved LambdaMoo. It was installed on our high school network in maybe '97 and I created whole worlds in there for friends to explore, including interactive functions. Had no idea I was writing "lambdas" at the time, it was just an interesting way to build a text adventure from within itself.

Wow, I had no idea LambdaMOO was capable of that. I knew that MUSH/MOO like systems were rich but not to that extent. It was essentially proto-Minecraft in a sense?

LambdaMOO is a fully programmable text-based virtual reality.

Here's the LambdaMOO programmer's manual: https://hayseed.net/MOO/manuals/ProgrammersManual.html

Webpage: https://www.moo.mud.org/

Other resources: https://github.com/johndoe771/lambda-moo-programming

And for LambdaMOO itself telnet to lambda.moo.mud.org 8888.

If you are looking for an interesting LambdaMOO like MOO to check out, I'd recommend ChatMUD (it runs a fork of LambdaMOO called ToastStunt). You can connect from the we. Using this webclient: http://pubclient.sindome.org/player-client/?gh=chatmud.com&g...

More resources for those interested, probably the most comprehensive and up to date site: https://lisdude.com/moo/

Very cool! Last I looked Lambda Moo and related topics seemed to lead to a maze of defunct ftp sites and occasionally a web site. Glad these aren’t completely lost to time.

For a telnet client, https://mudlet.org is something FOSS and crossplatform you can run (disclaimer - involved with project)

Or if you don't have telnet installed, you can use the `-t` option to netcat.

I spent many many hours playing/coding/wizard-ing with several Star Trek themed MOOs and an original space themed version. I thoroughly enjoyed the language and environment. MOO is really where I initially grasped and thrived with OOP.

I guess? I logged into it and there was some basic world that must have been out of the box demo data, and it seemed like basically a REPL where you could create objects like rooms, and verbs, and a verb could move you to a different room; so like a REPL with state like a shell's pwd and environment. I would just carve off rooms, I think I made some chest-like things. You'd write tons of text for different verbs people might use.

I can't remember any of the code, at all, now though. Just remember constructing "The Ethereal Plane" with all sorts of cloud metaphors for computing back before that was cool~

I never played one, knew a couple people who worked on them.

MOO software was one of the first handful of pieces of software I ever read the source for. Heard somewhere that a MOO (LambdaMOO?) had a Slab Allocator and I wanted to see how it worked.

Related from last year (just one comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405167

I spent an inordinate amount of time on Lambda in college, thanks to some friends that introduced me to it freshman year. It became the formative experience for a lot of my online time. I still log on there and a couple others, although these days it's really just to talk with one or two people that I don't have another connection to—the population on Lambda is a pale fraction of what it was at the peak in the nineties.

Some friends and I do still run our own MOO that we've been running since college on one person's computer or another. Through the years, it's outlasted ICQ, AOL, and every other form of instant-messaging doodad out there. It's simple, straightforward, and requires only an SSH client to connect to it from any device (since I run it on a Unix box, I just SSH to that and resume my session using tmux). Remarkably persistent, and a really nice way to continue talking with my friends every day.

LambdaMOO was awesome, and an incredibly practical introduction to OOP and security! Quc's cage for example. Who has permissions to call your characters move() method? What about who called them? Lets iterate the call stack or we'll either be stuck here forever, or we can never type "go north" again!

You have a Star Trek ship parent object, and these ships can fire at each other? Ok. Script to: Make this object into a star trek ship; Move me into it; Lock onto the other ship at this location; Fire all six photon torpedoes; Move me out of it; chparent back to $thing. Emit appropriate text to users in the room "Klingon warbird decloaks..." Bonus, do it again, get all six photon torpedoes back, because init() method called when chparenting.

i ran it on my laptop (colour screen!) 20y ago. mapped my apartment into it, with triggering objects etc.

Do you mean to say that you could interact with the virtual world and change things in the physical world? Like, drop an item in a virtual room to turn off a light in a real one?

I lived through all of this, was part of the community at the time this was happening. Very interesting times. I was a teenager at the time, so I look back at some of it with a bit of cringe. But I made some good friends there that I still have to this day.

These announcements led to some interesting political experiments.

A good(?) history of LambdaMOO's creation:

https://undark.org/2018/07/20/wilo-evans-broad-band/

I spent a ton of time on Lambda. Such a cool slice of computer history.

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