MOO: Encyclopedia II - MOO - History

MOO - History

Stephen White (also known by the handles "Ghondahrl" and "ghond") wrote the first version of the MOO server, which was released on May 2, 1990, and used for the operation of a server called "AlphaMOO". Pavel Curtis, an employee of Xerox PARC and also known by his handles "Lambda", and "Haakon", took the basic design, language, and code, fixed bugs and added features to release the first version, called "LambdaMOO" on October 30th, 1990.

According to Jill Serpentelli in her paper Conversational Structure and Personality Correlates of Electronic Communication:

MOO was originally developed as a MUD server in the same general style (sharing much of the command syntax and community conventions) as TinyMUD.

There is currently one distribution of the MOO server code. It is sometimes called the LambdaMOO server, indicating the close historical and continuing association of the MOO server code with the first public MOO, LambdaMOO, which is still popular today.

It is this LambdaMOO version of MOO that gained popularity in the early 90s, and it remains the only major distribution of MOO. Pavel Curtis continued to maintain the server for several years. Other early contributors to the LambdaMOO server included users "Gemba", "Gary_Severn", Roger Crew ("Rog"), Judy Anderson ("yduJ"), and Erik Ostrom (known as "Joe Feedback"). Later, Erik Ostrom maintained the server, and the server is now maintained by Ben Jackson and Jay Carlson and has a LambdaMOO SourceForge.net project.

Stephen White went on to write a new and similar system called CoolMUD, although it never obtained the same wide userbase as MOO. Another, later, attempt at writing programmable object oriented MU* servers was ColdMUD, written by Greg Hudson, later becoming known as "Genesis" and maintained by Brandon Gillespie.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki