ELEPHANT MUD HISTORICAL ARCHIVES

Ele Goes Legal...
News of Ele swiftly spread, despite attempts to keep it low key. Up until 1995, when we appeared on the Mud Connector and on various mudlists, we never advertised Ele at all; all our players found us via word of mouth and even now we play down advertising somewhat. Back then we could not afford to be big - all it would take would be for Liam Madden, the sysop in Elec Eng to look at the wrong time, and twenty or more network connections to the same port on the same machine would have stuck out like a sore thumb. Moreover the thing was already swelling to the point that it was getting hard to disguise. Eldrytch and I had to get creative to overcome our disk quotas too, by running the mud driver in one account and having the files, all with open group access, but carefully hidden, in the other!

For several weeks we thus hid, with only a 'select' few being told of it, but it became rapidly clear that if we wanted to survive for any length of time, we would have to get permission. Having a legal mud would have been a dream in some ways. So many others were springing up only to be discovered and closed down, and we didn't want that to happen. Rather we decided to take a risk and approach Liam. This was risky, for an unfavourable reaction would have killed us there and then and we had no way of knowing what sort of reaction we'd get. But we deemed it better to try and fail, than hide for a few months at best before getting deleted.

So it was that I, armed with arguments as to why a mud in Elec Eng would be a good thing and how it could be of great academic value, went to see Liam. It went brilliantly. Liam didn't know a huge amount about muds, and thus lacked some of the negative preconceptions prevalent in the academic establishment. Not only did he OK it but he created a whole new account for the thing on a machine that was fairly unused! Our disk quota became effectively 'whatever you need' and the machine was set up to reboot the mud if for any reason it or the machine crashed. Rather stunned but cackling manically with glee I ran off to tell everyone.

Ele had moved for the first time. Now, legally and with the backing of the machine's sysop, we were running on:

chips.ee.ic.ac.uk 4444

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