In the Beginning...
It all began with Steve Harris in November 1991.There
I was, a mere babe in arms in my first year, sitting minding my own business, down in the
Weeks Hall Bar at Imperial College, London, when up walks Steve. Steve and I knew each
other reasonably well, and he was drummer in a band I was in for a while. On this occasion
though, he didn't want to talk about drumming.
'Larnen' he said excitedly, 'check this out tomorrow!'.
Handing me a scrap of rather crumpled paper, he proceeded to tell me about a strange world
he had found 'on the computers' called 'Uglymug'. Thoughts of novelty beer containers
sprang to mind, but I decided to listen on anyway. Slowly he related to me how it was a
'sort of role-playing/buildy/party/social thing, in which people from all over the country
chatted to each other. 'And the best bit is, its free!'
Well the word 'free' did it. Next day I was there in
front of an unfriendly UNIX prompt, clutching my scrap of paper and psyching myself up for
my first excursion on to the Internet. Slowly I typed in the strange and seemingly
meaningless command I had been shown:
'telnet snowwhite.cs.man.ac.uk 4201'
There was a pause. There was a longer pause (ahh, how I
would come to know and hate the LAG beast, but for now it was 'just a pause'). But finally
up scrolled a banner. UGLYMUG it proclaimed. And I, as instructed, picked a name and
password. The name wasn't hard - I'd been called it for years anyway.
Thus Larnen appeared on the mud scene. The first
communication I ever had from another person on a mud was:
Paging from Arena, Bonkern_Honkelkis says
"type arena!"
The second was
Paging from The Happnin' Party Zone, Froggy says
"dont! its a trap!"
Cute, eh? It all went downhill from there :)
In the beginning |
The pre-Ele days | A pachyderm is born! |
Ele goes legal | Disaster strikes |
Middlesex Uni | Back to IC |
IC politics | Elephant today
|
