
LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - meanie
https://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/cs8113h_98_spring/LTAND.html
======
mherdeg
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...](https://www.villagevoice.com/2005/10/18/a-rape-in-cyberspace/0)
), 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?

~~~
mikekchar
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.

------
isamuel
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.

~~~
o-__-o
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)

~~~
isamuel
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!

~~~
o-__-o
:D

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

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

------
ntoll
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.

------
core-questions
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.

~~~
sedatk
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?

~~~
clouddrover
LambdaMOO is a fully programmable text-based virtual reality.

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

Webpage: [https://www.moo.mud.org/](https://www.moo.mud.org/)

Other resources: [https://github.com/johndoe771/lambda-moo-
programming](https://github.com/johndoe771/lambda-moo-programming)

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

~~~
stormcode
More resources for those interested, probably the most comprehensive and up to
date site: [https://lisdude.com/moo/](https://lisdude.com/moo/)

~~~
zxcvbn4038
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.

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

Related from 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075439)

------
castillar76
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.

------
lowbloodsugar
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.

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

~~~
armagon
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?

------
cmrdporcupine
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.

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

[https://undark.org/2018/07/20/wilo-evans-broad-
band/](https://undark.org/2018/07/20/wilo-evans-broad-band/)

------
loydb
I spent a _ton_ of time on Lambda. Such a cool slice of computer history.

