TinyMUSE Resources

Due to the incompetence of a few Web sites out there, this page is devoted to keeping track of the resources left for the MUSE community. The links in this page are mostly what remains out there of MUSE-related resources.

MicroMUSE: The Beginnings
MicroMUSE was the beginning of what is known as TinyMUSE. It began in 1990 under the name of MicroMUSH. After gradually taking on an educational and scientific social setting, it became known as MicroMUSE. It released various sources, helping other MUSE servers take off. It also launched MUSENET, a network of educational MUSEs working together to form a community. Generally, during the period of time of MUSENET's reign, most all the users on one MUSE could be found on another. An example of this common ground can be found at http://www.musenet.org/~oppsie/muse/muse.html.

TimeMUSE and OceanaMUSE: Differing Attitudes
TimeMUSE was an early MUSE server that harbored many MUSErs who were tired of the educational environment and bureacracy of MicroMUSE. OceanaMUSE began a few years after Time, massing a large active userbase. For a period of time, Oceana reached a greater record of activity than any other social MUSE had achieved.

TrekMUSEs: Integrating Role-Play
TrekMUSE and TOS TrekMUSE both originated from the TinyMUSE server in the early 90s. They have been extremely popular over the years, and it is not rare that they have one hundred users on at once. They are both specialized in role-play geared toward Star Trek. They have long been distanced from the MUSENET class of MUSEs, and entertain a completely different community. Due to their immense popularity, they have also had stronger code upgrades and been more reliable than other MUSEs. They, however, have less flexibility with projects in their database due to their theme.

WindsMARE: Send in the Nupers
Gandalf, a Director of MicroMUSE, also began his own branch-off of MUSE in the early 1990s. It was known as WindsMARE and Gandalf dedicated much of his time to changing its code. For the first time, MUSE went back to its origin in MUD, only this time with a more social and more original atmosphere. WindsMARE was constantly under pressure from bad management or needed resources, so it had frequent downtimes of great length. However, in its uptimes, it has quite a following and is an entertaining game to play.

CowMUSE & shkooism
shkoo, another Director of MicroMUSE, continued the MUSE source upgrades after MicroMUSE stopped at version 1.7b4. He ran a small development site called CowMUSE (which, according to legend, still exists someplace) which had a limited number of objects in its database, upgrading the MUSE version to 1.8a4. Version 1.8 had a great many of important achievements and original concepts included that most likely would not have been integrated into the source even today had it not been for shkoo. Morgoth and OceanaMUSE released a version 1.9 later on, but it was not as stable, nor as progressive as version 1.8.

MU*Net: Picking up the Pieces
In the end of the 1990s, text-based worlds were not experiencing the same growth as they had in the past. New users were more interested in experiencing new graphical worlds that would use their multimedia to its full capacity. However, while some of the more glorious MUSEs declined to become stagnant ghost towns, other administrations with an affinity for text-based worlds realized their uniqueness to all other forms of social worlds. A group of folks who had been around MUSEs since the early stages put together MU*Net, a public TinyFugue site where various modern text-based virtual worlds could be connected. Although VirtualChicago has not joined MU*Net yet due to discussions over whether there would be any benefit, the Web site contains a few links of value.

Other Resources
There are various clients and robot sources at ftp://ftp.tcp.com/pub/mud.
The MUSENET FTP site has a great deal of pictures, documents, and history lessons.
shkoo's FTP site contains a few pictures and server sources.