Mud (which stands for Multi-User Dungeon) was the first text-based fantasy game, developed by programmers Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University in 1978, allowing players all over the world to interact.Īrriving in "the Land" at a cottage next to a cemetery, new visitors could figure out the extent of their abilities, then explore, kill things and score points, with the ultimate goal of reaching the wizards' level. Multiplayer games were developed inside the internet's first decade, paving the way for games such as Second Life that define much of internet culture today. "But I do believe that my 1982 suggestion was the one that finally took hold and spread around the world." The first multiplayer game "I was probably not the first person ever to type these three letters in sequence, perhaps even with the meaning of 'I'm just kidding' and perhaps even online," Fahlman concedes. The group began devising some form of punctuation to mark posts that weren't to be taken seriously. At one point a humorous comment on the boards about a brainteaser involving mercury was interpreted as a safety warning, nearly causing the building to be evacuated. Often someone would make a sarcastic remark and a few readers would fail to get the joke. Professor Scott E Fahlman (below) worked at the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon in the early 1980s, at a time when it was making heavy use of online bulletin boards. "It was the best discussion – of the meaning of life, sexual practices, travel advice, love, law everything you find on the internet today except the commercialism."īrilliant adds: "About 99.9% of what made the well great was Stewart's ideas of what could be talked about and his uncanny ability to bring online the smartest people of the day – senators, governors, campaigners and a whole lot of writers." The first smiley "But Stewart had the good sense to ignore my idea and instead he just opened it up for discussions of any kind," Brilliant recalls. Brilliant pitched Brand an idea: he would use a version of the software to create a discussion forum for the items in the catalogue. The first example, known as the Well, began with a meeting between Brilliant and Stewart Brand, then editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, an early green-living manual. The next step was to develop a permanent text conferencing system – what we now know as an internet forum. On his return to America, Brilliant showed his system to Apple founder Steve Jobs and, on his advice, launched a modified version of the software that would run on people's home computers. Its original purpose was to organise the rescue of a helicopter downed on a humanitarian mission in Nepal. In 1981, while working for the WHO, Dr Larry Brilliant (below) created a primitive online conferencing system. Larry Brilliant, co-creator of the first online community Photograph: New York Times Just as quickly as it had spread, the Creeper was caught. The Reaper was also a self-replicating program, which spread through the system in much the same way that the Creeper had, and removed the offending virus from infected computers. The first piece of anti-virus software was created as a direct response to the Creeper's challenge. Infected machines would simply display the message, "I'm the creeper: catch me if you can," but did not suffer any lasting damage. It was created by an engineer called Bob Thomas working for BBN, the same company that employed email creator Ray Tomlinson. It is generally accepted that the first was a virus called the Creeper, which infected Arpanet in 1971. And why did he do it? "Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea." The first virusĬomputer viruses and worms, essentially just self-replicating programs, were predicted as early as 1949 by the mathematician John von Neumann. At the same time, Tomlinson also devised the format of modern emails, with the symbol dividing the user name from the name of the host computer (although he did not invent the symbol itsel). While the same principles are used to send emails across the world today, the very first email (the contents of which Tomlinson says he has long forgotten) was sent between two computers sitting right next to each other.
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