Nostalgia.com

There once was a place, long ago, where you could spend hours wandering around a new world - meeting new people, chatting to old friends, admiring ascii pictures, reading sumptuously detailed descriptions of glittering objects you encountered, battling the occasional dwarf, and picking up loot.


A megabyte? What's that?

The screen was black, the text was frequently green or yellow, in the style of old monochrome green monitors.

You didn't have to do battle and chat all at the same time, but many people did. Other people preferred to forego the battling altogether, in favour of international chat and dabbling in a bit of roleplay. This place was known as a MUD or MOO. If you look very carefully, you can still find them. IF you know where to look. I am glad few people know how to find MUDs and MOOs, for it keeps the tedious MySpace generation away, and lets the inner sanctum retain some of it's olde-worlde charm - circa 1991.


North. North. West. Sniff dwarf. Slay dwarf. Sit. Page wizzen "I'm bored, wanna chat?"

MOOs are good for the soul, in the same way that doing laundry and relaxing on a sofa are good for the soul. I know it might seem weird, but having to do all that reading and typing in order to get your point across did mean that there was a more intelligent species of person online. God I'm such a geek.

It's weird that I can get nostalgic about something which is seen as a relatively new thing. The Internet may not SEEM that old, but it has been going since the late sixties, when the US army developed its predecessor, ARPAnet. Most of us (I am speaking of people I know) got online in the early nineties. I know I started in 1989 with a brief appearance on a bulletin board via compuserve on my Atari STE. However, my first proper trip into cyberspace was in 1993 on a PC with a 14,400bps modem. Remember them? I doubt you do.

It's a sobering thought that most of the people who make up the online community nowadays weren't even born then.