Same here! I remember making my own port of DikuMUD because I wanted to start my own community but quickly learned how daunting the writing workload is and I sadly never finished my beginning city but it felt magical to have a friend from AlterAeon join me and enter this world I had built. It was all so accessible if you could just put in the time to world build.
Ditto! Digging through Diku and the derivative Smaug codebase was my gateway to programming and I am forever thankful that such software existed and was available for a young teenager to dive into.
Me too. Learnt a lot about Unix, c, networking and compilers getting it working in 1992.