LambdaMOO straddled(straddles?) a fine line between being a more "serious" system that looks more like a multiuser Smalltalk & Lisp -- with a persistent shared networked database, a live shared programming / authoring environment with a prototype OO scripting language ... and a "less serious" MUD.
You can (but don't have to) build a MUD in it -- that's what people did -- but in the TinyM* style not usually RPG type games, more social systems.
But it was sitting on some very cool concepts, especially for its time. Predating the web, kind of another "path" that the Internet could have taken. It took the web 15 years to catch up to the idea of synchronous live interaction, and it's still more ... document based... than the kind of object/thing/room/narrative aspect we had going on in MOO.
It's very clearly inspired by Lisp, Self, and Smalltalk. And LambdaMOO itself was, back then, a hub of some pretty nifty people. 'twas my (embarassing mostly) adolescence. And they handed out "programmer" bits easily, so it was full of people's self-programmed creations.
The implementation certainly didn't age well. But the foundational concept is very cool. There were later iterations on the idea (CoolMUD, then ColdMUD/Genesis, a few other things) that refined things somewhat.
Others have alluded to LPmud/LPC which had some similar-ish things going on, but that was less "persistent shared creation environment" styled and more "source code in files in a decent OO language for making MUDs" with transient objects/state between world resets. People built MUDs, games, in LPmud, but as said MOOs (apart from some exceptions) were less about games and more about what we'd these days might consider a form of social networking.
Both were very cool, but MOO encouraged a more participatory programming environment, since you could just log in and start creating (cloning prototypes) and authoring (writing MOO "verbs" etc).
Separate comment for a separate thread maybe: there are also a few interesting things that "fell out" of MOO research.
One thing was AstroVR, which was an environment for collaborative control over telescopes. That had an advanced client called Jupiter, which PARC researchers IIRC used to develop a protocol (also called Jupiter?) that supported distributed interfaces and provided correct ordering of event messages.
Now I really regret not encountering MOOs back in the day. It looks like it captures the fun parts even better than the LPMUD I knew. You're right that restarts of the server wiped out some objects (some were persisted, of course, but it wasn't a full-blown object database). You're also right about LP being more game-oriented - though I personally couldn't care less, there were normal players running around killing stuff, leveling, role-playing, and all that.
Unfortunately, I didn't know English back then, and the only choice I had was between Diku and LP. Well, it's not too late, this thread got me intrigued enough to take a closer look at MOOs (and MOOR), I think :)
This is a better explanation than I would have managed. MOO's language model was fascinating.
The best part of 30 years ago I started some research (that I dropped out of) that would have built training environments on top of MOO and similar.
I started out by using the facility to open up a port from MOO and serve a webserver from inside it, that a Java applet integrated with. Which you could do, but something about the way it closed connections interfered with POST requests as I recall.
I loved exploring MediaMOO in particular, and I remember wanting to ask Amy Bruckman a bunch of questions about Moose Crossing; I'm not sure if I ever did. That was fascinating work.
You can (but don't have to) build a MUD in it -- that's what people did -- but in the TinyM* style not usually RPG type games, more social systems.
But it was sitting on some very cool concepts, especially for its time. Predating the web, kind of another "path" that the Internet could have taken. It took the web 15 years to catch up to the idea of synchronous live interaction, and it's still more ... document based... than the kind of object/thing/room/narrative aspect we had going on in MOO.
It's very clearly inspired by Lisp, Self, and Smalltalk. And LambdaMOO itself was, back then, a hub of some pretty nifty people. 'twas my (embarassing mostly) adolescence. And they handed out "programmer" bits easily, so it was full of people's self-programmed creations.
The implementation certainly didn't age well. But the foundational concept is very cool. There were later iterations on the idea (CoolMUD, then ColdMUD/Genesis, a few other things) that refined things somewhat.
Others have alluded to LPmud/LPC which had some similar-ish things going on, but that was less "persistent shared creation environment" styled and more "source code in files in a decent OO language for making MUDs" with transient objects/state between world resets. People built MUDs, games, in LPmud, but as said MOOs (apart from some exceptions) were less about games and more about what we'd these days might consider a form of social networking.
Both were very cool, but MOO encouraged a more participatory programming environment, since you could just log in and start creating (cloning prototypes) and authoring (writing MOO "verbs" etc).