Discworld MUD - History

History

The MUD was founded in 1991 and opened to the public in 1992 (receiving continuous updates since then, now twenty years later). Originally containing a small section of the then rather loosely defined Ankh-Morpork, over time more locations have been added as the world has been further described in the book series, and laid out in the map supplements (such as The Streets of Ankh-Morpork and The Discworld Mapp). It now consists of areas that attempt to simulate several big cities (Ankh-Morpork, Bes Pelargic, Genua and Djelibeybi) on two continents, a larger number of smaller towns, and more than a million rooms which form the land between the cities and towns, with markers designating canon cities yet to be built.

The MUD was founded in Perth, Western Australia, by David "Pinkfish" Bennett, Craig "Furball" Richmond, Sean A. "Lynscar" Reith and Evan Scott. It was an outgrowth of another MUD called Discworld II. The MUD ran for a while on a machine in Melbourne before moving to run in the UK on a machine at Compulink where Gordon "DrGoon" was added to the administration team. After a while the machine was moved to the US, in Seattle, running on a machine at one of the admin's workplace, Derek "Ceres" Harding, before again moving back to the UK to run at Jake "Sojan" Greenland's house.

Discworld has publicly released the code base under which it runs on a couple of occasions, allowing other MUDs to use the same base for writing their worlds.