Powermud Beginnings
PowerMud began in 1993 as an alternative to TOPmud and Darker Realms which were two of the predominant muds on the internet when I first started mudding in the early 90s. The concept was a good one, and I had some ideas that were unheard of at the time - skills based advancement, bin'd commands, and languages. At East Texas State University, I met a guy who administered the UNIX machines in the computer labs, and since he was also running a mud called Cyberworld, he was open to my request to start a mud. The machine I originally started on was a machine called Dawn, and it was a slow piece of crap UNIX box that was the equivalent of a 386. It allowed me to compile the mud driver and start coding, but I knew it was not the machine to use when I wanted to open it up for players. After Decker, the systems administrator, moved his mud to a newer machine, it opened up a better machine for PowerMud. The new machine was called Elf and had TWO 500MB hard drives that were each about the same size as a clothes dryer, and for the first time, I ran XWindows on a COLOR monitor! PowerMud was now ready for Primetime.
About this time, I met a person in my Assembly Language class by the name of Jeff Kusheba, and little did I know that he would forever change my life. He was the FIRST player to logon to PowerMud, and was the first person I promoted to coder. His moniker? Viper of course! He was a flap coder in the beginning, but he now has golden wings with which to flap instead of the feathery variety. He started coding the towns and surrounding areas while I worked on the mudlib in general. He did a great job, and he rarely complained about having to rewrite all the rooms to accommodate a change made to the mudlib. This was the first incarnation of PowerMud that not many people ever saw. Some of you may know Descartes of Nightmare fame, but I knew him as part of PowerMud in the beginning although he never did much in lieu of his Nightmare project.
Eventually, the systems administrator moved on to greener pastures, and I was forced to move the mud from Elf to my personal machine. At the time, I was running Linux version 1.1.x on my home machine with a 14.4k slip connection to the university network, so I though it would work until I found a better site. This is where my deep affinity for fault tolerance and deep hatred of Connor hard drives began. This was soon after Viper had moved to Florida to play in a band, and I was looking for a new roommate as well. My Pentium 60 with 16MB of RAM and a 540MB hard drive crashed, and PowerMud was GONE! There were no offsite backups, and no matter how important PowerMud was to me, I could not afford the data recovery price, so PowerMud was dead without any hope for resurrection.
PowerMud II began a few years ago, and it lives on today in what you see now. Most of the ideas from the original version are here along with a lot of other ideas gleaned from Viper's scary mind and in all fairness, AD&D. Viper is now my partner, and for the most part does most of the coding nowadays. My career has really taken off as of late, so most of my time is spent either there or with my family. We have moved a few times, but after registering the powermud.com internet name, we are in it until we grow tired of it. I hope you have enjoyed this brief look into the history of PowerMud and the game with a better understanding of how long it has taken to get to this point.
Thanks,
Mark Sass,
aka Sassman