While I can’t comment on some of these points, what I do know is that when it comes to the UK, and particularly JANET, these systems were among the first MUDs. Aside from the author of this article, I knew others who were building systems very early on and a lot of his points tally. 

Anyway, I’m not chasing the who-did-what-first. I just thought these kinds of worthwhile exercises may be interesting to folks on this list. 

                -jon.

-- 
Jon Morgan
"Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon."

On Mar 20, 2026, at 18:24, Johnny Billquist via groups.io <bqt=softjar.se@groups.io> wrote:

But with that said, dnd do not appear to have been a multiplayer game.
And I'm not sure it predates ADVENTURE.

 Johnny

On 20/03/2026 19.18, Paul Koning via groups.io wrote:
On Mar 20, 2026, at 2:13 PM, Paul Koning via groups.io <paulkoning=comcast.net@groups.io> wrote:



On Mar 20, 2026, at 2:00 PM, John H. Reinhardt <johnhreinhardt@thereinhardts.org> wrote:

I'm guessing this perhaps was one of the sources.

https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/MUD1

MUD1 (referred to as MUD1, to distinguish from its successor, MUD2) is the oldest virtual world in existence. It was created in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw at Essex University on a DEC PDP-10 in the UK, using the MACRO-10assembly language. He named the game Multi-User Dungeon, in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing.[1][2] Zork in turn was inspired by an older text-adventure game known as Colossal Cave Adventure or ADVENT.[3]

John H. Reinhardt

That source is certainly very wrong about history.

paul
I can't help them with their errors, but it's amusing to notice that, while PLATO is not listed as an article, several other articles mention it, including the one on Dnd -- https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/Dnd -- which credits authors Whisenhunt and Wood.
A lot more PLATO history can be found in The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear.
   paul



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