It was definitely not a MMO! It was a bit of a joke comment (British humour - sorry). I’d be amazed if it had anything more than 100 consecutive players (that’s a complete guess).

I had no idea of it’s MUD heritage then and it’s only today that the comments above have really made me join those dots up.

The 300 baud was 1983-84. We must have been near the era of 14400 by 1990, but yeah, definitely 2400.

Long answer from an old guy looking through rose tinted glasses.

I’m what would probably be classed as the 2nd era of networking. I wasn’t a pioneer working on protocols in the 1970s, but I was small part of the group of network architects and engineers that rolled it out on a national scale (in the UK).

My first network experience that I can remember was using a service called Prestel which was run by the Post Office. I remember playing a multi user text based game called Shades - first MMO? I was rocking a 300bps (yes 0.3k) modem connected to a computer running an OS called CPM. This must have been around 1983.

Roll the clock forward 8 years, and I’m working at the University of Manchester. There was a national piece of work called Project Shoestring, the remit of which was to roll out the IP protocol across all the universities, encapsulating the data in the X25 serial network which connected them all together at that time.

I do remember the day when we got a TCP/IP stack up and running on a Novell server and I transferred my first piece of email via SMTP. I’m going to guess this was summer 1991.

The first bit of news I remember hearing across the network was Freddy Mercury’s death. Even in 1991, it was fastest means of news propagation, with the news only hitting traditional broadcast media several hours later and print newspapers the next day.

Around that time, a program called “Trumpet Winsock” was released. This was a flakey bit of code that allowed Windows 3.1 to connect to the internet natively (i.e. not across a modem). I cannot convey the excitement of this. Within a few weeks I had “friends” all across the globe. Network techies reaching out to one another via bulletin boards, ftp, mail scheduled file transfers, and Gopher (the precursor to the web developed in Minnesota). All using IP.

1993 and another seismic shift. The WWW arrived with a browser called Mosaic and some very, very unreliable server software that I ran on Windows 3.1. I wrote my first web site and by 1994 was running a site called “The FoxPro I/O Address” that connected programmers working with the FoxPro RDBMS language. “Visitor Books” were common on early websites, and it was so cool seeing comments from the US, Argentina, Eastern Europe etc. One amusing event from that time was the day someone sent me a tech support CD from Microsoft with a post it note telling me to look in a certain directory. Microsoft had only gone and scrapped the whole of the Foxpro I/O Address website (it wasn’t small) and published it on CD! It truly was the wild west.

Another memory is a book which I still have somewhere. “The 1994 Internet White Pages”. A large book (maybe around 1000 pages) which had every active email address in the world at that time. I believe they were mostly scrapped from USENET posts, but it’s bonkers to think that you could publish all the world’s email addresses in a book!

In the late 90s I had the pleasure of having dinner with Vint Cerf (look him up), on the Orient Express, no less. I remember asking him what was his single regret in developing the IP protocol. He’d obviously been asked that before, because he quickly said, “Security, we never put any security (encryption) in the packet headers. It never crossed our minds that anyone would use the internet for nefarious activities”. Man, I miss that time. There were no scammers, no phishing, no viruses (well the Morris Worm, but that was just exciting!).

I was fortunate enough to work in the place where the first programmable computer was built, virtual memory was developed, and early pioneers worked with Linus on Linux. My first distro was the Manchester Computing Centre version running on kernel v0.96. I have a floppy disk with it on somewhere! I learned a lot from some genuine unknown and uncelebrated giants in that building.

The internet is awesome, but I do miss those days. Those early net residents valued what they had and treasured it. We take it for granted today and rarely stop to appreciate how incredible it is, let alone how dangerous it is.

If you got this far… thanks for reading.

Just a piece of recent personal experience with Tuxedo:

Getting on in years, I had a yearning to do some dev work and thought I’d dip a toe back into the world of Linux. Going way back, I first used Linux back in 1993 (v0.99 iirc). Along with a FreeBSD box, it became my daily driver until around 2003. My last distro of choice was Mandrake, which I loved. With the advent of Apple’s unix based OSX, I jumped ship and never really gave Linux a second thought for over two decades. I occasionally flirted with Raspberry Pis, most notably for a weather station running WeeWx and another running PiHole and local DNS.

Anyway, it’s 2025 and I started looking around for some hardware. Tinkering with drivers and kernel modules etc held no interest for me and I was looking for something a bit more “turn key”. I wasn’t expecting to find the Linux equivalent of a MacBook Pro, but my interest was piqued by System76 and I then discovered Tuxedo. It took me a while to pull the trigger as I might have been buying an expensive white elephant, but I eventually ordered an Intel InfinityBook Pro 15.

The ordering process was smooth (lots of info about options and some really decent tech info on their website) and the laptop shipped about 10 days later via UPS. I was expecting it to get stuck in a post-Brexit clown show at UK customs, but I payed the custom fees to UPS directly while the shipment was in transit. It arrived, beautifully packaged about 4 days later.

I am genuinely speechless about the product. Bear in mind it’s over 20 years since I last used Linux in anger. Just to provide some context, KDE was on version 3 and I only ever used Gnome 1. Linux today bears very little comparison with the world I left, and man was it an OS revelation! The hardware is well made; the screen is stunning, and I have zero regrets purchasing a laptop from Tuxedo and would buy another without a second thought.

The only problem I’ve had in the last 6 weeks is a kernel message regarding USB ports timing out during shutdown. Ten minutes online and I realised it was a power saving issue which was solved with a simple config change to Grub.

Other than that, I’ve been back writing code for the first time in a lifetime and am having a ball. I now spend about 80% of my time using the InfintyBook and about 20% on my Macbook.

In short, based on a data set of a single purchase, I’d thoroughly recommend Tuxedo if you have the cash and are looking for something made and supported by a company in the EU.

I had my first migraine over 40 years ago and have been a regular headache suffer for most of my adult life. I’ve mentioned it to my doctor more times than I care to remember, and last August I mentioned it again. He told me to stop taking pain killers, I said “really, are you completely insane, they’re the only thing that make most days manageable!”. Anyway, I did what I was told, and although September was tough, I can’t actually believe the results.

I keep a bullet journal, and have some personal data of reasonable quality. During August 2022 I had a headache on 28 days out of 31 and 2 migraines (both in the same week). During July 2023 I had 1 headache and no migraines.

In a routine NHS email a few months later, I spotted this article:

https://patient.info/news-and-features/can-taking-painkillers-actually-give-you-headaches

I attribute a lot of my headache free life to this advice, and I’ve saved a boatload of cash from not buying my weekly collection of pain killers.

As other people have commented, it’s a complex medical area, but if you’ve tried everything else and pop pills regularly, it might be worth a shot…

Apple is my platform of choice these days. Full disclosure, I’m pretty well embedded in the Apple eco system and it’s been my consumer tech of choice for over 20 years.

I live in the UK and have recently cut the cord with Sky (for my non UK friends, Sky is essentially the equivalent of a cable service in the states), and I had a number of movies purchased through their store. Although I can still see those movies on an iPad, it’s not easy to watch them on a TV, so I’ve essentially lost those purchases.

In light of that experience, Apple feels the most future proof for me with Amazon Prime a close second.

I also recently “binned” most of my DVD/Blu Ray collection, but before doing so, I looked up what platforms they were available to stream/buy from. Out of just over 200 discs, Apple won with 122 available with Prime on 114.

Never heard that before, but I like it 👍

I learnt to drive in another era (early 90s) and I have to agree that lane usage and signalling on roundabouts appears to be completely random.

In the example given, I was taught you should be in the left hand lane and signal left for the first exit. For all other exits, you should be in the right hand lane and signal right UNTIL you’ve passed the exit before you want to turn. You should then signal left and change lanes to take the exit.

Just checked the Highway Code and section 186 does suggest this is still the “right” way to do this, but I think it’s easier said than done (e.g. 4 exits and 3 approach lanes. I would go for the middle lane for the second exit (straight on) and I probably wouldn’t signal).

https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/changes-and-answers/-highway-code-for-roundabouts

A big thank you to everyone working on wefwef. The rate of development is so impressive and much appreciated 👏