#bletchleypark — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bletchleypark, aggregated by home.social.
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Oh, and did I mention that you can find antennas from a certain german manufacturer at GB3RS? 😃
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Oh, and did I mention that you can find antennas from a certain german manufacturer at GB3RS? 😃
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And the highlight, for me at least, was the ham radio station GB3RS. Fully operational and served 7 days a week, 363 days a year, by more than 60 RSGB volunteers. Very impressive service, excellent station and radio exhibits.
Thanks to Laurie, Victor and ? for the nice chat. 🙂 -
And the highlight, for me at least, was the ham radio station GB3RS. Fully operational and served 7 days a week, 363 days a year, by more than 60 RSGB volunteers. Very impressive service, excellent station and radio exhibits.
Thanks to Laurie, Victor and ? for the nice chat. 🙂 -
And the highlight, for me at least, was the ham radio station GB3RS. Fully operational and served 7 days a week, 363 days a year, by more than 60 RSGB volunteers. Very impressive service, excellent station and radio exhibits.
Thanks to Laurie, Victor and ? for the nice chat. 🙂 -
And the highlight, for me at least, was the ham radio station GB3RS. Fully operational and served 7 days a week, 363 days a year, by more than 60 RSGB volunteers. Very impressive service, excellent station and radio exhibits.
Thanks to Laurie, Victor and ? for the nice chat. 🙂 -
And the highlight, for me at least, was the ham radio station GB3RS. Fully operational and served 7 days a week, 363 days a year, by more than 60 RSGB volunteers. Very impressive service, excellent station and radio exhibits.
Thanks to Laurie, Victor and ? for the nice chat. 🙂 -
Brilliant exhibition, well done. Recommended for all people interested in radio communications, codebreaking and history in general. Take the free guided tour, these guides know many anecdotes you will not find in any documentary.
#bletchleypark #history -
Brilliant exhibition, well done. Recommended for all people interested in radio communications, codebreaking and history in general. Take the free guided tour, these guides know many anecdotes you will not find in any documentary.
#bletchleypark #history -
Ooooh wie cool... Idee von Freunden, mit denen ich zum #emf fahre.
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Ooooh wie cool... Idee von Freunden, mit denen ich zum #emf fahre.
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¿Sabías que la "Madre de la Brujería Moderna" fue clave para descifrar mensajes ocultos en la Segunda Guerra Mundial?
Muchos conocen a Doreen Valiente por reescribir los rituales de la Wicca y darles esa belleza poética que hoy los caracteriza. Pero antes de cambiar la historia del esoterismo, Doreen usó su mente analítica para defender a su país. Durante los años 40, trabajó como traductora e investigadora en Bletchley Park, el centro secreto del gobierno británico. Su misión diaria consistía en revisar documentos y mensajes cifrados para romper las comunicaciones del ejército alemán. Esta experiencia no solo demuestra su enorme inteligencia, sino cómo esa misma capacidad de observación y rigor la llevó años después a ordenar, limpiar y estructurar los textos que dieron origen al renacimiento de la brujería en el siglo XX.
— Amber Luna, Bruja y Antropóloga
#DoreenValiente #Historia #BrujeriaModerna #BletchleyPark #paganismo
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¿Sabías que la "Madre de la Brujería Moderna" fue clave para descifrar mensajes ocultos en la Segunda Guerra Mundial?
Muchos conocen a Doreen Valiente por reescribir los rituales de la Wicca y darles esa belleza poética que hoy los caracteriza. Pero antes de cambiar la historia del esoterismo, Doreen usó su mente analítica para defender a su país. Durante los años 40, trabajó como traductora e investigadora en Bletchley Park, el centro secreto del gobierno británico. Su misión diaria consistía en revisar documentos y mensajes cifrados para romper las comunicaciones del ejército alemán. Esta experiencia no solo demuestra su enorme inteligencia, sino cómo esa misma capacidad de observación y rigor la llevó años después a ordenar, limpiar y estructurar los textos que dieron origen al renacimiento de la brujería en el siglo XX.
— Amber Luna, Bruja y Antropóloga
#DoreenValiente #Historia #BrujeriaModerna #BletchleyPark #paganismo
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Der Sommer ist zum Reisen da! Und natürlich zum Forschen. Letzte Woche sind Vivien Petras und @maria Gäde zu Gast an der @OpenUniversity gewesen. Neben fleißigem Schreiben gab es auch einen Abstecher ins Museum Bletchley Park, um sich mitten in der Hitzewelle kulturell weiterzubilden.
#Forschung #England #BletchleyPark #OpenUniversity -
Der Sommer ist zum Reisen da! Und natürlich zum Forschen. Letzte Woche sind Vivien Petras und @maria Gäde zu Gast an der @OpenUniversity gewesen. Neben fleißigem Schreiben gab es auch einen Abstecher ins Museum Bletchley Park, um sich mitten in der Hitzewelle kulturell weiterzubilden.
#Forschung #England #BletchleyPark #OpenUniversity -
Der Sommer ist zum Reisen da! Und natürlich zum Forschen. Letzte Woche sind Vivien Petras und @maria Gäde zu Gast an der @OpenUniversity gewesen. Neben fleißigem Schreiben gab es auch einen Abstecher ins Museum Bletchley Park, um sich mitten in der Hitzewelle kulturell weiterzubilden.
#Forschung #England #BletchleyPark #OpenUniversity -
Der Sommer ist zum Reisen da! Und natürlich zum Forschen. Letzte Woche sind Vivien Petras und @maria Gäde zu Gast an der @OpenUniversity gewesen. Neben fleißigem Schreiben gab es auch einen Abstecher ins Museum Bletchley Park, um sich mitten in der Hitzewelle kulturell weiterzubilden.
#Forschung #England #BletchleyPark #OpenUniversity -
Der Sommer ist zum Reisen da! Und natürlich zum Forschen. Letzte Woche sind Vivien Petras und @maria Gäde zu Gast an der @OpenUniversity gewesen. Neben fleißigem Schreiben gab es auch einen Abstecher ins Museum Bletchley Park, um sich mitten in der Hitzewelle kulturell weiterzubilden.
#Forschung #England #BletchleyPark #OpenUniversity -
Joan Clarke, who was born OTD in 1917, worked at #BletchleyPark during WWII and worked at GCHQ after the war until her retirement in 1977 https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/uk/bletchley-park/?s=mb #travel #cryptography #history
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Joan Clarke, who was born OTD in 1917, worked at #BletchleyPark during WWII and worked at GCHQ after the war until her retirement in 1977 https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/uk/bletchley-park/?s=mb #travel #cryptography #history
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David Rees, born OTD in 1918, worked on Engima cryptanalysis in Hut 6 at #BletchleyPark; he completed his education, worked on group theory, and headed the Math Department at University of Exeter https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/uk/bletchley-park/?s=mb #travel #history
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David Rees, born OTD in 1918, worked on Engima cryptanalysis in Hut 6 at #BletchleyPark; he completed his education, worked on group theory, and headed the Math Department at University of Exeter https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/uk/bletchley-park/?s=mb #travel #history
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Had a good day with my eldest. We went to the National Museum Of Computers at legendary Bletchley Park. I've been before, but he hadn't.
Despite his anxiety, he lasted a couple of hours which was better than I expected.
Photos attached.
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Had a good day with my eldest. We went to the National Museum Of Computers at legendary Bletchley Park. I've been before, but he hadn't.
Despite his anxiety, he lasted a couple of hours which was better than I expected.
Photos attached.
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The Dark of the Moon "Sometimes, lost people are still out there, just waiting to be found…" Sale: $4.99 to $2.49 by Fiona Valpy Rating: 4.6/5 (7,572 Reviews) #HistoricalFiction #WWII #Romance #BletchleyPark #Codebreakers #WomensHistory #BookSky
The Dark of the Moon -
The Dark of the Moon "Sometimes, lost people are still out there, just waiting to be found…" Sale: $4.99 to $2.49 by Fiona Valpy Rating: 4.6/5 (7,572 Reviews) #HistoricalFiction #WWII #Romance #BletchleyPark #Codebreakers #WomensHistory #BookSky
The Dark of the Moon -
The Dark of the Moon "Sometimes, lost people are still out there, just waiting to be found…" Sale: $4.99 to $2.49 by Fiona Valpy Rating: 4.6/5 (7,522 Reviews) #HistoricalFiction #WWII #Love #BletchleyPark #WomenInWar #Mystery #BookSky
The Dark of the Moon -
The Dark of the Moon "Sometimes, lost people are still out there, just waiting to be found…" Sale: $4.99 to $2.49 by Fiona Valpy Rating: 4.6/5 (7,522 Reviews) #HistoricalFiction #WWII #Love #BletchleyPark #WomenInWar #Mystery #BookSky
The Dark of the Moon -
Spent almost five hours at #BletchleyPark yesterday. So many amazing things to see and learn about regarding World War II, the role of codebreaking, and the development of early computers.
Would have stayed for longer but our kids were getting a bit overwhelmed by that point.
Highly recommended.
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Spent almost five hours at #BletchleyPark yesterday. So many amazing things to see and learn about regarding World War II, the role of codebreaking, and the development of early computers.
Would have stayed for longer but our kids were getting a bit overwhelmed by that point.
Highly recommended.
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#OnThisDay, 25 Mar 1941, the first WRNS arrive at Bletchley Park in the UK. They operate the Bombe machines used for decoding German Enigma machine messages. Their work helps shorten World War 2.
At its peak, 75% of the workforce at Bletchley were women.
#WomensHistoryMonth #WomenInHistory #WorldWar2 #History #BletchleyPark #Histodons
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#OnThisDay, 25 Mar 1941, the first WRNS arrive at Bletchley Park in the UK. They operate the Bombe machines used for decoding German Enigma machine messages. Their work helps shorten World War 2.
At its peak, 75% of the workforce at Bletchley were women.
#WomensHistoryMonth #WomenInHistory #WorldWar2 #History #BletchleyPark #Histodons
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I am happy with this DECSystem-10 MUD system for now; it's been a 35-year task.
If anyone is bored enough to be curious!
31 January 1991: Essex University's DECSystem-10 closes, meaning that MIST and ROCK, and the dodgy version of MUD we had on there, had to close. I had a mostly working VMS system that would run it with some extra programming, but I'd already sent out AberMUD to Vijay, and he'd sent it out to the world, and TinyMUDs were becoming common. MIST was losing its captive audience, and it needed that level of addiction and co-dependence to run, so I decided to let it die in its prime, rather than become a sad old relic that nobody played.
2003 and the next 20 years: I decided to build a TOPS-10 system on a VMS machine and install MIST/MUD and ROCK. Got quite a long way, and then discovered there was no BCPL compiler existing anywhere in the known world. A few years later, Richard Bartle told me that Paul Allen (I think) had found one. So this became possible, and Quentin (dot-co-dot-uk) took a great stab at it with some really old code, and Viktor Toth had BL running, so I figured that was enough. Sometime in this period, Bletchley Park got something that looked like a PDP-10, and they suggested that I go and put MUD onto it for the museum. It wasn't a PDP-10, but I did look into putting it onto a VAX for a while, but the management of Bletchley, as it turned into The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was getting more corporate and boring, so I gave up bothering.
19th Feb to 22nd Feb, 2026: I decided to build a PRIMOS machine on a Simh emulator for no apparent reason. It went fairly smoothly, so I wondered again about a DEC-10. I was missing TOPS-10 anyway, so why not? Proof of concept, setting up some test systems, seeing where TOPS-10 emulators were at these days and seeing how far Quentin had really got and how much extra work was needed. Realised I am going to have to start from scratch, mostly, using a prebuilt Steuben distro of TOPS-10 7.03 as the base.
Took a couple of weeks off to ponder whether the rest was worth it, but decided my $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription may as well pay for itself with background research, so I decided to go ahead.
9th March 9 to 18th March, 2026: A long sprint, and I mostly got it all working. 92 hours of concentrated swearing and about 15 hours of destroying the planet with GPT Deep Research mode later (*), after at least 2 false starts and complete wipes. I got a system I am relatively happy with. Somewhere in there is about 4 hours of relearning TECO and fighting with getting ROCK working on code it was never meant to work on. There's still more to do, but that's just maintenance now.
BUT I FOUND ROCK! I thought it was lost forever. Somehow, that's my major victory in all this. Building the setup was hard, tedious, and very frustrating work. It probably did need somebody who knew a lot about both DEC and Unix systems management, and the MUD engine, to guide it, but it was still mostly a matter of putting together things that already existed and forcing them to work together. ROCK, though, I genuinely thought was 100% lost.
It's taken a hundred plus concentrated hours, two new dedicated hosts, a small town's water supply, and probably a few megawatts of power in the background. But this is the final re-creation of the systems I closed at the start of the 1990s.
MIST (and MUD and ROCK) will still probably end up as relics that nobody properly plays, but this project is not pretending to be anything other than an interesting throwback and museum piece now, which, 35 years after I closed it down, seems a fitting end. It also means I can resurrect Duncan Rogerson's arch-wizard, and that seems right, somehow. I will leave it up and running now.
(*) Since someone whined about my use of GPT - I could not have mentioned it, but I did because, for some tasks like this one, it saved me hundreds of hours and a lot of Googling. If I have to pick (which I do!) I'd rather use GPT than Google still. One of the useful things you can do with Deep Research is to give it a topic you want to aggregate information on (like ACCESS.USR usage) and send it away to make a summary PDF of the key points of what's useful, but triple-checked and sourced. I have read the Original TOPS-10 manuals that are wonderfully hosted on @bitsavers many times, I could knock up a perfect ACCESS.USR in a drunken stupor, whilst half asleep once, but these days I barely remember the 3-part octal protections, so I am happy to have a reference I don't need to read 10 parts of 3 different manuals to make. That's why I use AI, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. Since I work in AI Ethics and actually put into practice what I preach, I am comfortable with my use of AI, and I always disclose it :P
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security #TNMOC #blog #ADHD #Autism
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I am happy with this DECSystem-10 MUD system for now; it's been a 35-year task.
If anyone is bored enough to be curious!
31 January 1991: Essex University's DECSystem-10 closes, meaning that MIST and ROCK, and the dodgy version of MUD we had on there, had to close. I had a mostly working VMS system that would run it with some extra programming, but I'd already sent out AberMUD to Vijay, and he'd sent it out to the world, and TinyMUDs were becoming common. MIST was losing its captive audience, and it needed that level of addiction and co-dependence to run, so I decided to let it die in its prime, rather than become a sad old relic that nobody played.
2003 and the next 20 years: I decided to build a TOPS-10 system on a VMS machine and install MIST/MUD and ROCK. Got quite a long way, and then discovered there was no BCPL compiler existing anywhere in the known world. A few years later, Richard Bartle told me that Paul Allen (I think) had found one. So this became possible, and Quentin (dot-co-dot-uk) took a great stab at it with some really old code, and Viktor Toth had BL running, so I figured that was enough. Sometime in this period, Bletchley Park got something that looked like a PDP-10, and they suggested that I go and put MUD onto it for the museum. It wasn't a PDP-10, but I did look into putting it onto a VAX for a while, but the management of Bletchley, as it turned into The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was getting more corporate and boring, so I gave up bothering.
19th Feb to 22nd Feb, 2026: I decided to build a PRIMOS machine on a Simh emulator for no apparent reason. It went fairly smoothly, so I wondered again about a DEC-10. I was missing TOPS-10 anyway, so why not? Proof of concept, setting up some test systems, seeing where TOPS-10 emulators were at these days and seeing how far Quentin had really got and how much extra work was needed. Realised I am going to have to start from scratch, mostly, using a prebuilt Steuben distro of TOPS-10 7.03 as the base.
Took a couple of weeks off to ponder whether the rest was worth it, but decided my $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription may as well pay for itself with background research, so I decided to go ahead.
9th March 9 to 18th March, 2026: A long sprint, and I mostly got it all working. 92 hours of concentrated swearing and about 15 hours of destroying the planet with GPT Deep Research mode later (*), after at least 2 false starts and complete wipes. I got a system I am relatively happy with. Somewhere in there is about 4 hours of relearning TECO and fighting with getting ROCK working on code it was never meant to work on. There's still more to do, but that's just maintenance now.
BUT I FOUND ROCK! I thought it was lost forever. Somehow, that's my major victory in all this. Building the setup was hard, tedious, and very frustrating work. It probably did need somebody who knew a lot about both DEC and Unix systems management, and the MUD engine, to guide it, but it was still mostly a matter of putting together things that already existed and forcing them to work together. ROCK, though, I genuinely thought was 100% lost.
It's taken a hundred plus concentrated hours, two new dedicated hosts, a small town's water supply, and probably a few megawatts of power in the background. But this is the final re-creation of the systems I closed at the start of the 1990s.
MIST (and MUD and ROCK) will still probably end up as relics that nobody properly plays, but this project is not pretending to be anything other than an interesting throwback and museum piece now, which, 35 years after I closed it down, seems a fitting end. It also means I can resurrect Duncan Rogerson's arch-wizard, and that seems right, somehow. I will leave it up and running now.
(*) Since someone whined about my use of GPT - I could not have mentioned it, but I did because, for some tasks like this one, it saved me hundreds of hours and a lot of Googling. If I have to pick (which I do!) I'd rather use GPT than Google still. One of the useful things you can do with Deep Research is to give it a topic you want to aggregate information on (like ACCESS.USR usage) and send it away to make a summary PDF of the key points of what's useful, but triple-checked and sourced. I have read the Original TOPS-10 manuals that are wonderfully hosted on @bitsavers many times, I could knock up a perfect ACCESS.USR in a drunken stupor, whilst half asleep once, but these days I barely remember the 3-part octal protections, so I am happy to have a reference I don't need to read 10 parts of 3 different manuals to make. That's why I use AI, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. Since I work in AI Ethics and actually put into practice what I preach, I am comfortable with my use of AI, and I always disclose it :P
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security #TNMOC #blog #ADHD #Autism
-
I am happy with this DECSystem-10 MUD system for now; it's been a 35-year task.
If anyone is bored enough to be curious!
31 January 1991: Essex University's DECSystem-10 closes, meaning that MIST and ROCK, and the dodgy version of MUD we had on there, had to close. I had a mostly working VMS system that would run it with some extra programming, but I'd already sent out AberMUD to Vijay, and he'd sent it out to the world, and TinyMUDs were becoming common. MIST was losing its captive audience, and it needed that level of addiction and co-dependence to run, so I decided to let it die in its prime, rather than become a sad old relic that nobody played.
2003 and the next 20 years: I decided to build a TOPS-10 system on a VMS machine and install MIST/MUD and ROCK. Got quite a long way, and then discovered there was no BCPL compiler existing anywhere in the known world. A few years later, Richard Bartle told me that Paul Allen (I think) had found one. So this became possible, and Quentin (dot-co-dot-uk) took a great stab at it with some really old code, and Viktor Toth had BL running, so I figured that was enough. Sometime in this period, Bletchley Park got something that looked like a PDP-10, and they suggested that I go and put MUD onto it for the museum. It wasn't a PDP-10, but I did look into putting it onto a VAX for a while, but the management of Bletchley, as it turned into The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was getting more corporate and boring, so I gave up bothering.
19th Feb to 22nd Feb, 2026: I decided to build a PRIMOS machine on a Simh emulator for no apparent reason. It went fairly smoothly, so I wondered again about a DEC-10. I was missing TOPS-10 anyway, so why not? Proof of concept, setting up some test systems, seeing where TOPS-10 emulators were at these days and seeing how far Quentin had really got and how much extra work was needed. Realised I am going to have to start from scratch, mostly, using a prebuilt Steuben distro of TOPS-10 7.03 as the base.
Took a couple of weeks off to ponder whether the rest was worth it, but decided my $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription may as well pay for itself with background research, so I decided to go ahead.
9th March 9 to 18th March, 2026: A long sprint, and I mostly got it all working. 92 hours of concentrated swearing and about 15 hours of destroying the planet with GPT Deep Research mode later (*), after at least 2 false starts and complete wipes. I got a system I am relatively happy with. Somewhere in there is about 4 hours of relearning TECO and fighting with getting ROCK working on code it was never meant to work on. There's still more to do, but that's just maintenance now.
BUT I FOUND ROCK! I thought it was lost forever. Somehow, that's my major victory in all this. Building the setup was hard, tedious, and very frustrating work. It probably did need somebody who knew a lot about both DEC and Unix systems management, and the MUD engine, to guide it, but it was still mostly a matter of putting together things that already existed and forcing them to work together. ROCK, though, I genuinely thought was 100% lost.
It's taken a hundred plus concentrated hours, two new dedicated hosts, a small town's water supply, and probably a few megawatts of power in the background. But this is the final re-creation of the systems I closed at the start of the 1990s.
MIST (and MUD and ROCK) will still probably end up as relics that nobody properly plays, but this project is not pretending to be anything other than an interesting throwback and museum piece now, which, 35 years after I closed it down, seems a fitting end. It also means I can resurrect Duncan Rogerson's arch-wizard, and that seems right, somehow. I will leave it up and running now.
(*) Since someone whined about my use of GPT - I could not have mentioned it, but I did because, for some tasks like this one, it saved me hundreds of hours and a lot of Googling. If I have to pick (which I do!) I'd rather use GPT than Google still. One of the useful things you can do with Deep Research is to give it a topic you want to aggregate information on (like ACCESS.USR usage) and send it away to make a summary PDF of the key points of what's useful, but triple-checked and sourced. I have read the Original TOPS-10 manuals that are wonderfully hosted on @bitsavers many times, I could knock up a perfect ACCESS.USR in a drunken stupor, whilst half asleep once, but these days I barely remember the 3-part octal protections, so I am happy to have a reference I don't need to read 10 parts of 3 different manuals to make. That's why I use AI, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. Since I work in AI Ethics and actually put into practice what I preach, I am comfortable with my use of AI, and I always disclose it :P
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security #TNMOC #blog #ADHD #Autism
-
I am happy with this DECSystem-10 MUD system for now; it's been a 35-year task.
If anyone is bored enough to be curious!
31 January 1991: Essex University's DECSystem-10 closes, meaning that MIST and ROCK, and the dodgy version of MUD we had on there, had to close. I had a mostly working VMS system that would run it with some extra programming, but I'd already sent out AberMUD to Vijay, and he'd sent it out to the world, and TinyMUDs were becoming common. MIST was losing its captive audience, and it needed that level of addiction and co-dependence to run, so I decided to let it die in its prime, rather than become a sad old relic that nobody played.
2003 and the next 20 years: I decided to build a TOPS-10 system on a VMS machine and install MIST/MUD and ROCK. Got quite a long way, and then discovered there was no BCPL compiler existing anywhere in the known world. A few years later, Richard Bartle told me that Paul Allen (I think) had found one. So this became possible, and Quentin (dot-co-dot-uk) took a great stab at it with some really old code, and Viktor Toth had BL running, so I figured that was enough. Sometime in this period, Bletchley Park got something that looked like a PDP-10, and they suggested that I go and put MUD onto it for the museum. It wasn't a PDP-10, but I did look into putting it onto a VAX for a while, but the management of Bletchley, as it turned into The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was getting more corporate and boring, so I gave up bothering.
19th Feb to 22nd Feb, 2026: I decided to build a PRIMOS machine on a Simh emulator for no apparent reason. It went fairly smoothly, so I wondered again about a DEC-10. I was missing TOPS-10 anyway, so why not? Proof of concept, setting up some test systems, seeing where TOPS-10 emulators were at these days and seeing how far Quentin had really got and how much extra work was needed. Realised I am going to have to start from scratch, mostly, using a prebuilt Steuben distro of TOPS-10 7.03 as the base.
Took a couple of weeks off to ponder whether the rest was worth it, but decided my $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription may as well pay for itself with background research, so I decided to go ahead.
9th March 9 to 18th March, 2026: A long sprint, and I mostly got it all working. 92 hours of concentrated swearing and about 15 hours of destroying the planet with GPT Deep Research mode later (*), after at least 2 false starts and complete wipes. I got a system I am relatively happy with. Somewhere in there is about 4 hours of relearning TECO and fighting with getting ROCK working on code it was never meant to work on. There's still more to do, but that's just maintenance now.
BUT I FOUND ROCK! I thought it was lost forever. Somehow, that's my major victory in all this. Building the setup was hard, tedious, and very frustrating work. It probably did need somebody who knew a lot about both DEC and Unix systems management, and the MUD engine, to guide it, but it was still mostly a matter of putting together things that already existed and forcing them to work together. ROCK, though, I genuinely thought was 100% lost.
It's taken a hundred plus concentrated hours, two new dedicated hosts, a small town's water supply, and probably a few megawatts of power in the background. But this is the final re-creation of the systems I closed at the start of the 1990s.
MIST (and MUD and ROCK) will still probably end up as relics that nobody properly plays, but this project is not pretending to be anything other than an interesting throwback and museum piece now, which, 35 years after I closed it down, seems a fitting end. It also means I can resurrect Duncan Rogerson's arch-wizard, and that seems right, somehow. I will leave it up and running now.
(*) Since someone whined about my use of GPT - I could not have mentioned it, but I did because, for some tasks like this one, it saved me hundreds of hours and a lot of Googling. If I have to pick (which I do!) I'd rather use GPT than Google still. One of the useful things you can do with Deep Research is to give it a topic you want to aggregate information on (like ACCESS.USR usage) and send it away to make a summary PDF of the key points of what's useful, but triple-checked and sourced. I have read the Original TOPS-10 manuals that are wonderfully hosted on @bitsavers many times, I could knock up a perfect ACCESS.USR in a drunken stupor, whilst half asleep once, but these days I barely remember the 3-part octal protections, so I am happy to have a reference I don't need to read 10 parts of 3 different manuals to make. That's why I use AI, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. Since I work in AI Ethics and actually put into practice what I preach, I am comfortable with my use of AI, and I always disclose it :P
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security #TNMOC #blog #ADHD #Autism
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I am happy with this DECSystem-10 MUD system for now; it's been a 35-year task.
If anyone is bored enough to be curious!
31 January 1991: Essex University's DECSystem-10 closes, meaning that MIST and ROCK, and the dodgy version of MUD we had on there, had to close. I had a mostly working VMS system that would run it with some extra programming, but I'd already sent out AberMUD to Vijay, and he'd sent it out to the world, and TinyMUDs were becoming common. MIST was losing its captive audience, and it needed that level of addiction and co-dependence to run, so I decided to let it die in its prime, rather than become a sad old relic that nobody played.
2003 and the next 20 years: I decided to build a TOPS-10 system on a VMS machine and install MIST/MUD and ROCK. Got quite a long way, and then discovered there was no BCPL compiler existing anywhere in the known world. A few years later, Richard Bartle told me that Paul Allen (I think) had found one. So this became possible, and Quentin (dot-co-dot-uk) took a great stab at it with some really old code, and Viktor Toth had BL running, so I figured that was enough. Sometime in this period, Bletchley Park got something that looked like a PDP-10, and they suggested that I go and put MUD onto it for the museum. It wasn't a PDP-10, but I did look into putting it onto a VAX for a while, but the management of Bletchley, as it turned into The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was getting more corporate and boring, so I gave up bothering.
19th Feb to 22nd Feb, 2026: I decided to build a PRIMOS machine on a Simh emulator for no apparent reason. It went fairly smoothly, so I wondered again about a DEC-10. I was missing TOPS-10 anyway, so why not? Proof of concept, setting up some test systems, seeing where TOPS-10 emulators were at these days and seeing how far Quentin had really got and how much extra work was needed. Realised I am going to have to start from scratch, mostly, using a prebuilt Steuben distro of TOPS-10 7.03 as the base.
Took a couple of weeks off to ponder whether the rest was worth it, but decided my $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription may as well pay for itself with background research, so I decided to go ahead.
9th March 9 to 18th March, 2026: A long sprint, and I mostly got it all working. 92 hours of concentrated swearing and about 15 hours of destroying the planet with GPT Deep Research mode later (*), after at least 2 false starts and complete wipes. I got a system I am relatively happy with. Somewhere in there is about 4 hours of relearning TECO and fighting with getting ROCK working on code it was never meant to work on. There's still more to do, but that's just maintenance now.
BUT I FOUND ROCK! I thought it was lost forever. Somehow, that's my major victory in all this. Building the setup was hard, tedious, and very frustrating work. It probably did need somebody who knew a lot about both DEC and Unix systems management, and the MUD engine, to guide it, but it was still mostly a matter of putting together things that already existed and forcing them to work together. ROCK, though, I genuinely thought was 100% lost.
It's taken a hundred plus concentrated hours, two new dedicated hosts, a small town's water supply, and probably a few megawatts of power in the background. But this is the final re-creation of the systems I closed at the start of the 1990s.
MIST (and MUD and ROCK) will still probably end up as relics that nobody properly plays, but this project is not pretending to be anything other than an interesting throwback and museum piece now, which, 35 years after I closed it down, seems a fitting end. It also means I can resurrect Duncan Rogerson's arch-wizard, and that seems right, somehow. I will leave it up and running now.
(*) Since someone whined about my use of GPT - I could not have mentioned it, but I did because, for some tasks like this one, it saved me hundreds of hours and a lot of Googling. If I have to pick (which I do!) I'd rather use GPT than Google still. One of the useful things you can do with Deep Research is to give it a topic you want to aggregate information on (like ACCESS.USR usage) and send it away to make a summary PDF of the key points of what's useful, but triple-checked and sourced. I have read the Original TOPS-10 manuals that are wonderfully hosted on @bitsavers many times, I could knock up a perfect ACCESS.USR in a drunken stupor, whilst half asleep once, but these days I barely remember the 3-part octal protections, so I am happy to have a reference I don't need to read 10 parts of 3 different manuals to make. That's why I use AI, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. Since I work in AI Ethics and actually put into practice what I preach, I am comfortable with my use of AI, and I always disclose it :P
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security #TNMOC #blog #ADHD #Autism
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This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.
I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.
One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.
I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.
So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to:
Or:
telnet telnet.dec10.uknet.net
(Port 2653 is available for ISPs that block 23)
And then follow the terse instructions from there.
In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.
I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...
Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.
** Update: New web client that works better.
** Another update - I added a telnet client.
Historically, the telnet connection is much more true to the traditional experience, where you were connecting to a working machine that didn't care about the MUD Guests, so there were no pointers at all. Just rumour and hearsay :)
If any of you Unix/Security people notice I messed up something, please tell me. I left "^], !sh" open on the telnet link for about 2 minutes and nearly had a heart-attack once I spotted it :D
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security
(don't try this on a phone!)
-
This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.
I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.
One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.
I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.
So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to:
Or:
telnet telnet.dec10.uknet.net
(Port 2653 is available for ISPs that block 23)
And then follow the terse instructions from there.
In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.
I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...
Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.
** Update: New web client that works better.
** Another update - I added a telnet client.
Historically, the telnet connection is much more true to the traditional experience, where you were connecting to a working machine that didn't care about the MUD Guests, so there were no pointers at all. Just rumour and hearsay :)
If any of you Unix/Security people notice I messed up something, please tell me. I left "^], !sh" open on the telnet link for about 2 minutes and nearly had a heart-attack once I spotted it :D
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security
(don't try this on a phone!)
-
This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.
I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.
One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.
I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.
So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to:
Or:
telnet telnet.dec10.uknet.net
(Port 2653 is available for ISPs that block 23)
And then follow the terse instructions from there.
In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.
I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...
Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.
** Update: New web client that works better.
** Another update - I added a telnet client.
Historically, the telnet connection is much more true to the traditional experience, where you were connecting to a working machine that didn't care about the MUD Guests, so there were no pointers at all. Just rumour and hearsay :)
If any of you Unix/Security people notice I messed up something, please tell me. I left "^], !sh" open on the telnet link for about 2 minutes and nearly had a heart-attack once I spotted it :D
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security
(don't try this on a phone!)
-
This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.
I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.
One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.
I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.
So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to:
Or:
telnet telnet.dec10.uknet.net
(Port 2653 is available for ISPs that block 23)
And then follow the terse instructions from there.
In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.
I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...
Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.
** Update: New web client that works better.
** Another update - I added a telnet client.
Historically, the telnet connection is much more true to the traditional experience, where you were connecting to a working machine that didn't care about the MUD Guests, so there were no pointers at all. Just rumour and hearsay :)
If any of you Unix/Security people notice I messed up something, please tell me. I left "^], !sh" open on the telnet link for about 2 minutes and nearly had a heart-attack once I spotted it :D
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security
(don't try this on a phone!)
-
This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.
I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.
One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.
I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.
So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to:
Or:
telnet telnet.dec10.uknet.net
(Port 2653 is available for ISPs that block 23)
And then follow the terse instructions from there.
In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.
I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...
Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.
** Update: New web client that works better.
** Another update - I added a telnet client.
Historically, the telnet connection is much more true to the traditional experience, where you were connecting to a working machine that didn't care about the MUD Guests, so there were no pointers at all. Just rumour and hearsay :)
If any of you Unix/Security people notice I messed up something, please tell me. I left "^], !sh" open on the telnet link for about 2 minutes and nearly had a heart-attack once I spotted it :D
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security
(don't try this on a phone!)
-
The Rose Code "As England prepares to fight the Nazis, 3 very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park" Sale: $19.99 to $5.99 by Kate Quinn Rating: 4.6/5 (63,145 Reviews) #HistoricalFiction #WWII #BletchleyPark #WomenInHistory #Mystery #Codebreaking #BookSky
The Rose Code: An Intriguing N... -
The Rose Code "As England prepares to fight the Nazis, 3 very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park" Sale: $19.99 to $5.99 by Kate Quinn Rating: 4.6/5 (63,145 Reviews) #HistoricalFiction #WWII #BletchleyPark #WomenInHistory #Mystery #Codebreaking #BookSky
The Rose Code: An Intriguing N... -
Visited #BletchleyPark yesterday. Just fantastic!
I spent the whole day there, 10am - 5pm, and I still didn't manage to see everything!
I also enjoyed one of the free guided tours with one of the very knowledgeable volunteers who clearly had a lot more to tell than the 1hr allowed.
For #InternationalWomensDay (3/4 of those at BP were women), there are interactive activities - I really enjoyed writing messages in #Baudot-Murray code and manually punching holes in paper cards.
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Visited #BletchleyPark yesterday. Just fantastic!
I spent the whole day there, 10am - 5pm, and I still didn't manage to see everything!
I also enjoyed one of the free guided tours with one of the very knowledgeable volunteers who clearly had a lot more to tell than the 1hr allowed.
For #InternationalWomensDay (3/4 of those at BP were women), there are interactive activities - I really enjoyed writing messages in #Baudot-Murray code and manually punching holes in paper cards.
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Celebrate women of computing history with film for Women's History Month! These outstanding films about heroes of computing will get students of all genders excited about computer and IT careers. For grades 4 and up.
😎 Breaking Enigma
💪 Her War, Her Story
🚀 Hidden FiguresLearn more:
#WomensHistoryMonth #WomensHistory #InternationalWomensDay #ComputerScience #Education #History #Histodons #Homeschooling #HiddenFigures #BletchleyPark
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Celebrate women of computing history with film for Women's History Month! These outstanding films about heroes of computing will get students of all genders excited about computer and IT careers. For grades 4 and up.
😎 Breaking Enigma
💪 Her War, Her Story
🚀 Hidden FiguresLearn more:
#WomensHistoryMonth #WomensHistory #InternationalWomensDay #ComputerScience #Education #History #Histodons #Homeschooling #HiddenFigures #BletchleyPark
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🎉 Happy International Day of Women & Girls in Science! Celebrate with with hit films that get students of all genders excited about science and STEM careers.
Get our free teaching guides with classroom-ready lesson plans for grades 3-12 and adult/higher ed. 📚🎬
What are your favorite films about women and girls in STEM fields?
#WomenInScience #WomenInStem #GirlsInStem #StemEducation #Stem #Education #Homeschooling #Movies #BletchleyPark #JaneGoodall #AskFedi
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🎉 Happy International Day of Women & Girls in Science! Celebrate with with hit films that get students of all genders excited about science and STEM careers.
Get our free teaching guides with classroom-ready lesson plans for grades 3-12 and adult/higher ed. 📚🎬
What are your favorite films about women and girls in STEM fields?
#WomenInScience #WomenInStem #GirlsInStem #StemEducation #Stem #Education #Homeschooling #Movies #BletchleyPark #JaneGoodall #AskFedi