Happy 18th, TinyTIM —
John Rescigno and I have no idea when the MUD/MUSH we started, TinyTIM, was actually “started”. We were certainly screwing around with the MUD program in late February and early March of 1990. We were both college sophmores (he at Clarkson University and I at Emerson College) and we were abusing an open account on the MIT AI Lab’s machine. A few years after we founded it, we decided to make, arbitrarily, March 18th 1990 the official “birthday” of this game.
It’s still around, 18 years later. It’s been though a half-dozen cities and many machines, and has been a lifetime of experience crushed into a simple C program.
It’s still up if you telnet to yay.tim.org port 5440. Someday, I will write about that place and all that happened. Not everyone will be happy when I do. But until that dark day, let’s focus on the good parts. So many friendships, so much love, so much greatness out of something that calls itself a game.
Happy Birthday.
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Happy Birthday, TIM.
I just remember that it was set up on the ‘mike’ account (password: ‘mike’) on the gnu machines at MIT. Maybe pogo, or maybe wheat-chex, I don’t remember. But that, since it was, essentially an “open” account, lots of people (re: hacker kiddies) were using it. I had given the account to my friend Casey McCabe, who, being new to UNIX was experimenting with commands. This experimentation resulted in him changing ‘mike’s password to ‘mikeekim’. I knew, at the time, when he did this, but I had NOT realised that the Mike account is the one TIM was running under. So a couple of days later I was talking to you, and you were unhappy (I remember a note of panic, but perhaps that is the embellishment of my imagination) about this. When I informed you of the new password, you were, I would say, displeased. BUT, it meant you could tar up TIM and move it someplace safer. Yay.
TinyTIM was a hell of a place… I used the system around ’93 on. Was introduced to Tim through a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fan club magazine mention – a Tim member had @dug a huge Satellite of Love feature in Tim.
I liked making gadgets on there, like vending machines and voice recorders and so on. Fun as hell for a then-twelve year old. Most people were older than me at the time. Now I’m 27 and I and I miss the days of Tim, BBSes, and mischief.
Is TIM deceased?
Oh wow… I know I’m a little late, but I was just thinking… because of TIM I have been chatting on the net for… ugh! over 15 years now…. :o) My birthday is coming up…. and I was just thinking about that…