By Ded Ryzing: Before there was World of Warcraft or Facebook or even MSN Messenger and ICQ there was LambdaMOO. An online community unlike any other and ahead of it’s time…and in a way, still ahead of the game. Ahh the memories…the all nighters connected when I should have been studying. Making more friends in the virtual than I ever made in the real…it was a good time.

Now, for the majority of you out there and likely everyone younger than 30, I know you have no idea what I’m talking about. Here is a bit of a history lesson. LambdaMOO was, well, a MOO (Multi-user Object Oriented or MUD Object Oriented) and a MOO is a text based virtual reality / community / rpg system on which hundreds of users can connect simultaneously and interact in real time. Oh, but don’t think it’s just chat…no no no my friends, it is much more than that! It is also a complete object oriented programming language which members can use to create and / or manipulate the virtual world. The best analogy I can give is to think of World of Warcraft meets Second Life…but completely text based.

There used to be literally hundreds of different MOOs in existence, but LambdaMOO was by far the largest. On any given night there would be 300-400 people connected. It had every type of feature you could imagine…and if it didn’t, you could create it. All this for free. Guest characters were welcome and to have a registered character all you needed was a valid paid or institutional e-mail address.

Ok, great…so why should you care… well, you probably don’t have to. This is all just me reminiscing. Cleaning out my software folder, I found the old client I used called SimpleMU and fired it up…I logged into my old character on LambdaMOO and was amazed to see that it was originally created almost 13 years ago! I hope LambdaMOO continues on…it is the grandfather of Web 2.0, Second Life and all the Massive Multi-player games out there today.

I wrote this article for the kids of today. for those who grew up with the Internet and not knowing there was a time before graphical browsers and MySpace and Instant Messaging. This is the beginning and the foundation of your online world now. This is legacy and legend.

How to connect

• Connecting to LambdaMOO is easy. Open any Telnet client or a dedicated MOO / MUD client and go to the address lambda.moo.mud.org port 8888

For more information

• LambdaMOO Wikipedia Entry
• Rachel’s Super MOO list (the most comprehensive listing of all MOOs that ever existed)
• Pavel Curtis’ Blog (the founder / creator of LambdaMOO)
• Download SimpleMU (a freeware MOO client, better than telnet)

If anyone out there used to, or still does, connect to LambdaMOO or any other MOO, leave me a comment. I’d sure love to hear about your experiences!

Tags: LambdaMOO, MOO, MUD, Pavel Curtis, World of Warcraft, Second Life, MySpace, Facebook, telnet, SimpleMU