Discovered: Oct 17, 2026 03:11 (UTC) September 1993:: Loyd Blankenship:: The Cow Ate My Brain - A Novice’s Guide to MOO Programming, Part I <– I remember reading this in the 1990s :-) and thinking I should write some code for this. Clearly that didn’t happen!

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  • Read the whole thing: The Cow Ate My Brain

    If you’re reading this, you’ve probably stumbled on to at least one MOO. At the high-concept end of things, a MOO is a multi-user, text-based virtual reality. At the low-concept end of things, think of it as a multi-player Infocom-style game that lets you talk to other players and build new locations and objects.

The MOO is a program running on a Unix-type computer system. The original MOO is LambdaMOO, and was developed by Pavel Curtis at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from an initial body of code provided by stephen White at the University of Waterloo. It has been up and running since October 1990.

The main program working the MOO is called the “server.” The server handles all the nitty-gritty details such as input/output between the Internet and the MOO, parsing (figuring out) the lines you enter, and so on. The source code for LambdaMOO’s server is freely available via FTP at parcftp.xerox.com. It has been ported to a number of systems, from BSD/I to Linux to Amiga Unix. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive guide to setting up and running a MOO (mainly because I don’t know much about it!), so we’re going to assume that the reader has logged into someone else’s MOO.

The other big duty of the server is to compile and run programs (called “verbs”) written in a language called MOO. MOO is a cross between C++ and LISP. The programming language is thoroughly documented, but the docco is not really aimed toward the novice user.

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